I’m here at the Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C. If you ask any student to point to the silicon content in their house they will immediately point to their solar array. Very few will point to the dozens of inverters, power supplies, TV’s, computers, ipods, horizontal axis washers, LED lights, or other items that are [...]
TI is on-site today as a returning sponsor at the 2009 Solar Decathlon in Washington DC. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Solar Decathlon brings together 20 university teams from across the globe in a competition to design, build and operate the most energy-efficient and attractive solar-powered home. Tomorrow marks the first official [...]
Today, TI announced the opening of RFAB, a new manufacturing facility in Richardson, TX. RFAB will be the world’s only production facility to use 300-millimeter silicon wafers to manufacture analog chips, and the first phase of production will be capable of manufacturing more than $1 billion worth of analog chips annually.
From smartphones to netbooks, analog [...]
Starting tomorrow in the U.S., TI will host MCU Day, its largest worldwide training event to be held around the world at more than 150 locations. This free, one-day technical training event will explore TI’s broad MCU portfolio, including MSP430™ ultra-low power MCUs, C2000™ real-time MCUs and ARM® Cortex-M3-based Stellaris® MCUs as well as ARM9-based [...]
I’m Rich Nowakowski, product marketing manager in TI’s power management group. Increasing energy efficiency and decreasing solution size seem diametrically opposed in many cases. Besides a cooler and more compact circuit board, mean time between failures (MTBF) can be improved. This article, recently published in Wireless Design & Development, explores several methods to improve efficiency and [...]
The deployment of smart meters in Europe is planned to reach about 100 millions of units in the coming 10 years.
This past week, I was able to see the efforts provided by the entire European utility market while visiting major meter manufacturers in France. France is very unique in that its market is very [...]
Hello, I’m Kanika Carver, Marketing Manager for TI’s OMAP-L1x/C674x products. Over the past several months, we have been in discussions with customers who are developing Power Protection Systems in countries like China, Europe, India and even here in the U.S. A Power Protection System is a remote device located outside of a building that monitors [...]
Power factor correction (PFC) results in greater power grid efficiency because it enables systems to smooth out the power they draw. This results in systems only drawing the power they need, reducing the occurence of unexpected spikes. Consequently, power companies do not need to produce extra power to compensate for sudden spikes. For this reason, PFC is becoming a [...]
This week, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, ACEEE, released a comprehensive report titled “Semiconductor Technologies: The Potential to Revolutionize U.S. Energy Productivity”. In conjunction with this report the Semiconductor Industry Association, SIA, released a series of recommended public policies that would help ensure the energy savings that the ACEEE report identifies.
In general, [...]
Yesterday, TI announced its new TMS320F2803x Piccolo MCUs featuring a Control Law Accelerator (CLA) producing more reliable, energy-efficient embedded control applications that provide 5X performance boost, making it possible for developers to integrate key system functions in a single controller. This integration helps reduce overall system cost while enabling technologies that use less power, such [...]