National Semiconductor Helps Customers Solve System-Energy Challenges

The trend towards energy conservation continues to grow worldwide. As market forces drive higher user experience expectations and the adoption of video streaming and sharing, mobile broadband, and unlimited storage capacity, the resources required to power this trend are finite. Therefore, enabling electronic systems to be more energy efficient becomes imperative and is especially important as the cost of energy continues to rise.

At the system level, National helps customers solve energy efficiency problems with integrated circuits (ICs) from its PowerWise® family of components as well as architecting unique system solutions which it embeds in silicon or licenses as intellectual property. There are currently approximately 300 ICs in National’s PowerWise family including energy-efficient power management, operational amplifier, interface and data conversion products.

To make it easy for customers to optimize power and performance, National has established a set of PowerWise metrics to help system designers easily compare and select energy-efficient analog components and subsystems. National has strict criteria for power and performance and is setting a standard where none currently exists. Depending on the type of IC, National used product-specific, practical formulas incorporating commonly used engineering measurements to determine each efficiency specification for 24 product families. For example, the metric for a high-speed data converter factors in both the key dynamic performance metrics and the power consumed. National has published its PowerWise metrics, along with descriptive whitepapers and other resources to help designers create energy-efficient systems, on its Web site: www.national.com/powerwise.-National Semiconductor