By Ted Speers

In eager anticipation of my impending jetlag, I opted to craft my inaugural posting to Low Power Engineering. After all, my attempt to complete today’s NY Times Crossword was less than stellar (what the hell is a 3 letter word for ‘rowdydow?’) as was my effort to dust off my FreeCell skills. So here I sit, in seat 22G on a United 777 bound for SFO from Seoul pondering how to dazzle you with insightful commentary about power.

I’ve been at Actel for almost 22 years, heading the company’s product planning for about a third of that time. Sitting here at 35,000 feet off Juneau is an appropriate place to start relating my thoughts about how we are going to make serious money off our low-power technology (secondary of course to our primary mission of saving the world from the global warming and peak oil hangover resulting from our binging on cheap energy). Actel has been making money for decades now selling our Firm Error immune FPGAs to the commercial aviation business. I’d venture a guess that there are more than 100 of our parts on this very plane responsible for delivering me and my 200+ new friends safely to our destination. The same story is repeated on every Boeing and Airbus jet that you care to name. I’m proud of that.

We expect to continue to make products for this important market. There are even strong indicators that other industries are waking up to the pernicious effects of atmospheric neutrons and I’m sure I’ll figure out how feature that observation into a future posting. I’m returning from Korea because our new goal is to have at least one low power Flash based FPGA in the hands of every passenger on this plane. It hasn’t been easy but we’re going to do it.

The reasons it hasn’t been easy are quite complex actually. Over the course of my next few posts, I’ll do a deep dive into some of these complexities. But that’s not what I’m going to discuss now. I thought it would be interesting and informative to look at power (energy really) from about a 30 million foot view. From this vantage point, we can decide where it might be interesting to do a deep dive in future posts.

So what do things look like from 30 million feet? It looks just like this:

This is the energy balance of our little blue dot. Thanks to such phenomena as the strong nuclear force, gravity and mass-energy equivalence, we currently have about 174 PW of power invading our world. BTW, what’s a PW? I’m glad you asked. That’s a petawatt or 10¹⁵ Watts. If you can follow the figure, about 52 PW gets reflected straight back out into space while the remaining 122 PW gets absorbed by the earth (89 PW) and the atmosphere (33PW). For completeness, I included geothermal energy which is estimated to be a paltry 30TW (enough to make large mountains if given enough time but not enough to hold a candle to the sun) and tidal power.

What’s with the red arrows? Well, what comes down, must go up. In this case, the 122 Watts of incident power heats up the system until an equal amount of power ultimately gets radiated back into space (thank you quantum mechanics). Again, for accuracy, I am speaking of a system in equilibrium. There are estimates that as much as 430 TW of that incident power isn’t escaping at the moment which some speculate may have some future impact on your flood insurance rates.

Now coming down to about sea level, where humans tend to congregate, what is the power story there?

Currently, we’re consuming energy at a pace of about 15.4 TW. How much is that? If we crammed all 6.8 GB (gigabutts) of us into an elevator, we could all ride to the 80 thousandth floor and come back again to do it the next day (assuming the kids don’t press all the buttons of course). This elevator today is largely powered by hydrocarbons. If all of our energy came from hydrocarbons, we would exhaust proven recoverable reserves in about 160 years (or about 60000 elevator rides). Proven conventional nuclear reserves could only power the world for 4 years which would lead one to look elsewhere for the 70000^th elevator ride. Nuclear advocates will correctly point out that adoption of fast breeder technology could make our nuclear resources effectively limitless. It is surprising to observe that the source of power for earthquakes and volcanoes could only take us on two rides a day.

If we could harness all the solar energy that doesn’t get reflected, we could all take 4 trips to the moon each day. As it is, today we only ride to the 850^th floor of our 80000 floor journey on direct conversion of solar power. Others are much more voracious in their solar appetite. Biomass uses 95 TW (or 6 elevator rides) worth of solar energy each day to convert CO2 to oxygen (thank you chlorophyll) and another 71 TW is converted to wind energy.

Finally, what do we do with all of this energy we consume (we don’t actually use it for elevator rides).

Well, a little less than third of it gets effectively flushed down the toilet due to inefficiencies in energy conversion (eg. Coal to electricity) and transport (losses in the grid). A little more than a third gets used to make things (includes growing things (agriculture) and finding things (mining)). About a fifth gets used to either move things or people around. About an eighth keeps us comfortable in our homes and another sixteenth keeps our businesses running. I did find it interesting to note we could pay for most of our commercial energy needs (with the added benefit of losing a lot of weight) by giving up eating.

Well, I’ve been informed that my computer needs to temporarily suspend consuming energy so that’s it for today. I can’t promise that I won’t be taking another high-level view of energy but I definitely will be exploring how electronics can make an impact on how energy is consumed. Hopefully at this point, we may have some idea where to look for opportunities to do just that.

–Ted Speers is an Actel fellow

Tags: Actel

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