Power Bits: Analog’s Comeback
By Ed Sperling
Analog engineers have always scoffed at the amount of energy consumed by their digital colleagues. But ever since digital electronics have become tied to a battery, the shoe has been on the other foot. This hasn’t sat too well with the analog side of the house, and it’s beginning to show. The race is on to achieve energy efficiency on all sides.
Case in point: A Canadian company, Airtest Technologies, has created an infrared gas sensor for CO2 that it claims consumes 50 times less energy than conventional CO2 sensors, even while sampling up to 20 times per second. What’s different is that it uses an infrared LED developed by the U.K. military.
Another case in point: Texas Instruments introduced a new front end for femtocell base stations and portable software-defined radio. What’s particularly interesting with this application is the ability to maximize energy efficiency at the expense of performance, or vice versa. Having that kind of flexibility is a big win where usage models vary greatly, depending on what a device is used for or the cost of energy at a particular time of day.
What should put this sector toward even greater energy efficiency is the fact that in stacked die, re-engineering analog blocks for the latest process node won’t be an issue. They will be able to run at whatever process node makes sense, allowing analog engineers to put more effort into performance and efficiency rather than just meeting production deadlines.
