My name is Rick Zarr and I am a geek.  OK, I’ve said it publically for the record.  I get excited over reading articles on quantum well transistors and photonic lattice light emitting diodes.  Yes, I live to learn about technology and how it can be employed to improve our lives. Most of all... I like to build things - always have and always will. I have a "home project" worksheet that looks more like a broker’s stock…

As a technologist I am often asked what single change would bring about a more stable energy infrastructure - it’s not quite that simple.  Our infrastructure has evolved over the past several hundred years into the distributed, fairly reliable source of electrical and chemical energy that we now enjoy.  To pose this question is like asking what single change could be made in a human body to allow us to live longer…

I was fueling my car the other day and the pump I was using had one of the worst user interface designs I have ever come across (the brand of pump will remain nameless... but you know who you are).  As I struggled with the poor response time, lack of feedback and just overall bad programming (and this was a simple fuel pump) it made me think... what energy is lost due to users taking extra time using a system with a poor…

I was wandering around the show floor of the Design Automation Conference (DAC2009) in San Francisco last week talking to various vendors of EDA software and other interesting semiconductor design tools. I was amazed at how many vendors had that special tool for "lowering power by up to 20%" - just press the button and our tool will magically reduce your system power.  Oh, if it were only true - the problem…

So there’s an energy crisis... I don’t know about you, but when someone tells me they’re in a "crisis" state, it usually involves 911, paramedics, attorneys or counselors.  Somehow I don’t get the same feeling about our energy "crisis" when I’m driving to work and I’m stuck in traffic, or when I’m flying a "red eye" home from the west coast and I’m looking out the window at thousands of square…

Just about every week I step onto some form of aircraft - mostly turbine powered kerosene burning jets.  I leave my carbon footprint trailing all over the friendly skies and often reflect on that fact.  After running for a flight and finally settling into my generously spacious coach seat, I get a chance to breath and relax.  My mind often goes to past episodes of Star Trek or other futuristic science fiction shows where…

I’ve been blogging now for over a year and have covered topics ranging from nano-technology and the future of semiconductors to large scale power generation and transmission.  This week marks the 50th anniversary of my company, National Semiconductor.  This milestone reminded me of how far we’ve come as a technological race.  While writing I’ve often reflected on my past engineering experience to look for examples…

As many of you know, Gordon Moore stated in his paper of 1965 that the trend for integration of digital transistors will increase exponentially, doubling every two years. So far, Moore’s Law has been pretty close if not conservative.  Looking at the Intel 4004 processor of 1971, it represented a transistor count of around 2300 devices (yes, two thousand three hundred transistors).  The new Intel Quad-Core Itanium…

When I was a young boy, I became a big fan (and still am) of Syd Mead and his vision of the 21st century as viewed from the 1960s.  I remember my mom buying me a book for my birthday on the history of the automobile.  Not only did it include the invention and history, but wonderful depictions of future automobiles that were hydrogen powered and could jack up their wheels and take flight like an aircraft using lift jets -…

OK, imagine its 1984 (for a glimpse into the past, see my previous post, "If Houses Grew Like Hard Drives"). Someone walks up to you on the street (possibly dressed in a black suit) and hands you an iPhone 3G. What would you think? Remember, 1983 was the year Motorola introduced the DynaTAC 8000X "brick" phone  - and it was just a (very large mobile) phone...  Technical issues with using a 3G phone in…

My previous post "AC vs. DC - The Westinghouse / Edison War Continues..." has created some very active feedback and thus compelled me to create a "part two" post on the subject.  Surprisingly, there are individuals on both sides of the fence.  Some are very pro-DC, others pro-AC.  It’s fascinating to see the reasons for each point of view.

Some readers are promoting DC for use in HV transmission…

Did you know if Edison had his way, all generation and transmission of electrical power including the outlets in your house would provide direct current (DC) instead of alternating current (AC) that we have today?  Around the turn of the 20th century, Nikola Tesla invented alternating current generation, transmission and AC induction motors.  He then licensed his patents to George Westinghouse and the war with Edison began…

Once upon a time there was a geeky guy who loved computers and electronics. Alas, he was unmarried, sans children and a social life.  So, one day he decided it would be a good idea to connect up two disconnected things - his home computer and his X-10 based lighting modules he purchased from Radio Shack.  This required some embedded design, assembly code, printed circuit boards, several severe shocks and some application…

I’ve been hearing a great deal about how various technologies will be deployed to help reduce our carbon foot print as well as provide a sustainable energy future for all... these include alternative energy generation, smart grids, new solid state lighting, and more.  The most interesting thing is that underlying all of those technologies (and many others) are the semiconductors that provide the computational engines…

The symbol has become ubiquitous with the efficient use of energy - it is the squiggly shaped compact florescent lamp or CFL that screws into an Edison base light fixture.  These little wonders of engineering have improved the efficacy of lighting over the incandescent bulb by quite a bit, but are still relatively expensive and have serious issues with lighting systems and dimmers.

Let’s take a look at the basics first…

Happy New Year... with CES around the corner, it is interesting to think about consumer electronics and how energy efficient they are today.  I often think that with so many new devices available to consumers, the amount of energy consumed is actually growing at an ever increasing rate.  This is most likely true simply due to the decreasing cost of certain technologies. As consumers buy more, it is even more imperative…

While wandering the isles at our local department store in an effort to complete my holiday shopping, I had to pause in the home electronics section and admire the collection of large format LCD and plasma HDTV systems on display. I slipped back in time to when I was a young engineer and could only imagine displays that large and thin... and here in front of me was an assortment of gigantic HDTV displays that you could…

As the Chief Technologist for PowerWise® Solutions at National Semiconductor, I’m often asked why there is so much emphasis on improving the energy efficiency of semiconductors while there are so many large consumers of power elsewhere. The reasons are many, however there are semiconductors in just about every product on the planet these days and once the function provided by the electronics is accomplished, and the energy…

I was exploring the Internet to see what happened to SETI’s @home project - I once was a member and ran their client on a Windows 2000 machine in my office.  I was quite surprised to see that the project had evolved and was still alive and well.  More interesting than that was the myriad of projects that were using distributed or "grid" computing.

It started me thinking about problem solving in general…

As noted in one of my recent blog posts, "The Quest for Energy Independence" (June 30, 2008), I get a sick feeling every month while opening my power bill which many of you probably share.  As most of you experience, the price of electricity has gone through the roof and there’s possibly no end in sight.  As fuel costs continue to surge, so does the price of a kilowatt-hour. We are so dependant on electricity…

If you’ve never been to Kansas, you should go - especially the out lying towns that sprung up in the early 1900s to handle the grain produced by the heartland of America.  Recently I was on a family vacation to visit relatives and found myself driving for miles and seeing nothing but fields of various grains in every direction.  This is the most flat yet beautiful country side I’ve ever seen.  Everywhere you…

In my position I hear a great deal of discussion regarding the physical trade-offs between performance and power consumption.  "If you want to accelerate quickly in a car, you need power to overcome inertia."  I agree... but increasing the size of the power plant in a car isn’t the only way to get it to accelerate faster.  Inertia is a function of mass (F=ma) so by decreasing the mass, you can get faster…

What if you could simply lay your cell phone and Bluetooth headset on a charger plate and charge it up without wires.  You may very well be doing just that very soon... Now imagine those chargers are everywhere!

The whole idea of powering something without wires goes as far back as Nikola Tesla circa 1891.  His ideas of providing wireless power to equipment located anywhere was a bit "out there", but he had the right idea…

In this world of ever increasing energy costs, almost everyone is trying to save where they can.  I’m one of those people that try to watch our electric bills and understand where all the power is going...  only one problem - there is only one meter on the house.  This lonely meter tells me - via my bill each month - how many kilowatt-hours were consumed by our household.  Not really informative enough for me.  This…

In part one of this series I talked about moving more digital signal processing back to the analog domain to save energy. The savings is accomplished by both reducing processor cycles and by moving the functions to lower power analog solutions.  But what about the software code itself? Does it have energy content and can it be optimized to reduce a system’s power consumption?  The answer to all of these questions…