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 powered or controlled with tiny semiconductor chips.  These chips are also silicon based…

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 day of the event with the opening ceremony, after which the Solar Village…

Once just a glimmer in our eyes, the 2009 Department of Energy Solar Decathlon (SD09) competition is now upon us.  In October, twenty university teams from around the world will bring their high-tech houses to the National Mall in Washington DC to show off their skills in super-energy-efficient home design, as well as their ability to pull off a massively difficult project.

Naturally, most of the of the focus of the SD09…

This week the final piece of a very unique project came into place at last.  TI announced that the 220,000 square foot Richardson Fab (RFAB) is open for business.  Pending final regulatory approval and other conditions, TI will acquire a large quantity of 300mm manufacturing tools from a bankrupt manufacturer - a reminder that even in tough times, opportunities exist.

RFAB has been quite a topic of interest over the past…

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 chips are the essential components in most of the electronics…

In case you haven’t seen it in the latest issue Newsweek: TI ranked 23rd in the magazine’s first environmental ranking of America’s 500 largest corporations!

What this means: Among U.S. companies and across all sectors, TI is doing a darn good job of operating conscientiously. We’ve worked hard to reduce environmental impact from our operations, and our efforts and successes have been recognized.…

Electronic energy meters have fostered their way into the market the last decade replacing conventional electromechanical meters. This has led to increased accuracy and features, reduced cost and size, and an opportunity to get smart. Energy measurement in its purest form, is just a mathematical sum of products of voltage and current. Just like any other math operation, this can easily be accomplished digitally using…

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 regulated, with a specific public utility company, EDF, delivering electricity…

Professor Soo-Young Park and his team at the Seoul National University in Korea successfully developed a white LED with a color rendering index (CRI) closer to daylight than current white LEDs.

The development parallels the ongoing efforts by LED manufacturers who continue investing in the improvement of luminous efficiency, lifetime and the quality of light as measured by the CRI.

An important step for Prof. Park’s LED…

With energy usage top of mind, who hasn’t been exposed to commercials stating “the energy produced buy the sun in one minute equals the amount used by the entire population of the planet for one year,” or a similar, hard to define claim.  The truth is there’s an incredible amount of energy out there for us to capture outside of the traditional sources, like wind and solar.

Apparently the oceans of…

Texas Instruments and the 2009 Solar Decathlon
Texas Instruments has long been committed to driving energy innovation. In October, TI will continue its involvement in building a greener future as a returning sponsor of the 2009 Solar Decathlon. This event 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. Sponsored…

Today TI announced that it is sponsoring this year’s Solar Decathlon, to be held in Washington D.C. October 9-18.  Similarly to 2007, 20 university teams are competing in the 2009 event and I’m sure each and every team is hacking their way through home construction, product acquisition and a myriad of design changes as problems arise, are dealt with and dispatched ahead of tomorrow’s batch of “issues”……

Today’s telecommunications and computing designs, such as MicroTCA systems, femtocell or other 3G wireless base stations, require high-density power systems in smaller form factors without sacrificing energy efficiency. Embedded processors continue to raise the bar in levels of processing performance and features. New analog power management integrated circuits, such as a new single-chip DC/DC converter announced today…

Wireless communications for Automated Meter Reading (AMR) promise tremendous time and cost savings for utilities. However, specific challenges exist when selecting and implementing an AMR solution.  Due to certain topology restraints, AMR can be conducted via “drive by” (or “walk by”) reading, where a utility employee literally drives by and collects the data. Therefore, data monitoring and tracking is not continuous …

Capturing the energy from the sun and transferring it to electrical or thermal energy can be used to its fullest potential only if it can be stored. On a cloudy or rainy day or at night, energy needs to be provided to the consumer at any given time or on a continual basis. For this, storage technology needs to be part of the energy system.

So why is storage technology still a challenge? It turns out that at a utility or…

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 as LED lighting and…

In 1970 Senator Gaylord Nelson called for the first Earth Day  to be held on April 22nd.  The goal was to raise environmental awareness and seek solutions to the environmental degradation that had begun to afflict parts of the planet.  Senator Nelson once said “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.”  He is correct and great progress has been made on many fronts…

Have you ever thought about how a solar cell functions and operates? Its function is quite simple: converting sunlight to electricity. Its operation is quite rudimentary. Solar cell is a semiconductor. The primary characteristic of a semiconductor is the presence of a band-gap. This band-gap has a finite energy. In a simplistic view, when sunlight is incident on the solar cell, the carriers which are electrons and holes…

A few years ago TI injected a sustainable challenge into the semiconductor industry when we completed the first LEED Gold certified wafer fab in the world in Richardson, TX.  It was followed fairly quickly by TSMC’s LEED Gold fab in Taiwan.  Several other semiconductor manufacturers have LEED projects completing or in development and the industry players are collaborating on green semiconductor practices via the

When people talk of solar power efficiency they are almost always referring to the conversion efficiency of the photovoltaic (PV) panel.  The PV conversion efficiency is the ability to turn available sunlight into a DC voltage and current.  For most mass produced panels the efficiency number is in the teens.  Improving the PV efficiency without increasing the cost improves the cost efficiency of solar power.  Cost efficiency…

Well, the Strategies in Light conference did the trick for me. I still have things coming up in my mind and go "...ah yeah, ... she said that... that's really important." So here is a more structured summary of what I saw and heard:

After tens of millions of dollars and many lawsuits, more and more x-licensing deals are struck in the LED industry. This collaboration between device manufacturers makes products…

LEDs have been constantly evolving over the last couple of decades. Developments like the blue and high brightness LEDs mark important steps towards the broad adoption of solid state lighting in TV, computer displays and outdoor signs. With the display markets moving ahead, the natural next step is to have solid state lighting help save energy in day-to-day lighting applications.

I have come across a couple of data points…

Almost 15 years ago I designed my own resource efficient home, which is still ahead of its time even today. When we give tours of our home I’m often asked “what would you do differently?”  Much has changed in the last 15 years.  If I were designing a new resource efficient home right now here are the things I would focus on:

Size

Space efficiency has a favorable impact on so many areas.  An appropriately…

Once again, even during these trying times of money crunch and investment, California continues to be an ambassador of generating power using alternative energies.  This time, the utility company Pacific Gas & Electric is planning to invest directly towards building and owning solar plants and panels over several communities. The company has already been working towards generating clean energy through other providers.…

My fascination with Energy Technologies continues to be fueled by the variety of applications I come across. So in the morning we talk about LED lights helping to reduce energy consumption in residential and commercial buildings. At lunch we talk about solar inverters and in the afternoon oil exploration becomes the subject.

The common theme is the use of semiconductors in an ever increasing number of fields to make things…