By Markus Levy

Check out any car advertisement and the efficiency of the car is printed in big bold letters. It has to be. The EPA requires it. What’s changed is that consumers are now paying much more attention to those numbers.

Suddenly, it’s cool to be green. The “in” car in Silicon Valley these days for those who can afford it is the Tesla. And over the next few years, it’s going to be joined by the Fisker, Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, and a slew of others from almost every manufacturer. Even regular gasoline engines and diesel engines have seen a huge jump in fuel efficiency.

But in gas and diesel engines, improvements in the energy consumption are now facing a law of diminishing returns. It now costs too much to save less. So instead of looking at just the engine, car designers are changing their focus.

Top on the list is the electronics bill of materials, and for good reason. Electronics modules account for up to 20% of the fuel consumption. They also require a bigger alternator with each passing generation to handle the growing number of electronics subsystems in cars. So far, there has been very little done to optimize the use of microcontrollers in cars. The thinking has been, “There’s plenty of power so there’s no need to save batteries.”

While all vendors have integrated sleep and low power modes, they are rarely used except when the key is off. Most of the microcontrollers stay in a polling mode to check on and manage system functions.

A first step to understanding the problem is to standardize on efficiency measurement, which includes a combination of processing ability and energy consumption. That will allow OEMs to compare processors more accurately and help justify different ways of reducing power in the software that most in the industry have been reluctant to update.

In my view, this can’t happen soon enough. What do you think?

Markus Levy is the president of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC), an independent benchmarking organization for semiconductors.