Video: The road to energy-efficient electronics

Symposium calls for changes from circuits to networks.

By Source: Rick Merritt, EE Times June 17, 2009

Designing energy efficient

electronics will require architectural changes at every level from post-CMOS

circuits to smart building networks, according to speakers at a symposium on

the topic hosted by the University of California at Berkeley.

Electronics consume about

290 TeraWatt hours of electricity a year in the United States, a small slice of

the nation’s estimated total annual consumption of about 3,700 TWh. Buildings

draw the lion’s share of the power, about 2,700 TWh a year, said Bruce Nordman,

a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in an opening talk.

Nordman called for engineers

to create a radically new architecture for smart, networked buildings based on

universal standards to curb power use. Today’s building controls such as

programmable thermostats can increase power waste because they are proprietary

and hard to use, he said.

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