The first things that usually spring to mind in connection with energy efficiency are industrial and automotive applications where regulation of high power is required. Yet there is also a great energy-saving potential in the various communication technologies. For example:
Central offices
Thousands of telephone lines come together in the large central offices of telephone companies. Each single line – no matter whether analog, ISDN or DSL – uses electricity to send and receive signals. Furthermore, complex network processors connecting and controlling the calls and data streams are involved. You can picture a central office as a vast computing center. Instead of computers, the line cards and routers are piled up side by side. The power consumed on the one hand by these devices and on the other hand for cooling is of critical importance to the telephone company as the power costs meanwhile account for a substantial share of the running expenses. Infineon’s power-saving communications chips can reduce power costs in central offices.
Home gateways
The energy efficiency of our wireline-communication chips also plays an important part in the living room and study at home. Being able to phone and surf anytime and being constantly online means round-the-clock internet connection. Home gateways operate 24 hours a day. 365 days a year. That’s why every watt counts. Infineon therefore pays attention to efficient implementation of the required functionality even as the chips are designed. Not only does each single user benefit from this, but – due to the huge quantities – also the environment.
Mobile phone chips
Efficient energy management is important even in battery-operated devices as an empty battery is charged from the mains. A hundred million mobile phones have to be charged every day. We worked on adapting our radio frequency transceivers to power-saving CMOS technology at a very early stage. In the meantime we are the market and technology leader for this technology. This change to CMOS technology also allows us to integrate the RF transceiver together with other already CMOS-based chips: baseband and battery management. As a result we also set the industry benchmark for single-chip solutions. Single-chip solutions are not only cheaper than multi-chip solutions, they also use significantly less energy as there are no power-guzzling connecting lines.