Miniaturization is driving microcontrollers into smaller packages with increasing performance and power consumption driving up the thermal requirements.

A new ZigBee PRO specification called Green Power is a low-cost energy harvesting and ultra-long battery life specification for ZigBee wireless applications.

This article looks at the global trend toward low power microcontrollers & examines recent solutions from TI, Freescale, NXP, Energy Micro, Atmel & Silicon Labs.

This article looks at the role of Microcontrollers (MCUs) in industrial automation, specifically examining how they provide the real-world interface to sensors and actuators.

This article examines a range of mixed-signal chip microcontrollers of varying sizes and features that are readily available today to support new mixed-signal designs aimed at sensor interfacing.

Autonomous peripheral cores that offload an MCU's main processor from many routine tasks are becoming an increasingly popular way to enhance an embedded processor's real-time performance while dramatically reducing its energy consumption.

Data-acquisition systems that use energy harvesting (EH) for all of their operating power are increasingly popular.

Micro development systems provide engineers with high-level environments from which to springboard into their own designs.

This article will provide some insight into how energy harvesting technologies can be deployed with great advantage in control automation applications.

As the serial port disappears from desktops and laptops, the Universal Serial Bus (USB) is now the common interface for all kinds of peripherals that need to connect to a PC, both as development platforms and commercial products.

ZigBee transceivers are a popular, and in some cases, indispensable element of modern energy management and building automation systems.

Commercial lighting is unique in that there is a diversity of tasks that take place in a typical commercial building.

With the rapid rise of battery-powered consumer and embedded applications, developers now have a wide range of low-power microcontrollers from which to choose.

Microcontrollers are running at ever-lower power consumption to open up new applications such as smart lighting and wireless metering.

Harvesting ambient energy, such as light, vibration or heat differential, to power electronics is such a neat and logical idea; it is not surprising it has captured the imagination of electronics engineers for a decade or more.

Microcontrollers are at the heart of any control system, and for commercial lighting, they have two key roles to play in reducing the power consumption.

A new generation of 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers is driving down the power consumption of devices and opening up new opportunities in smart control systems.

Developing an energy budget that insures a product will achieve its target service life can be a bit of a "black art," but there are a few techniques that can help achieve the right balance of performance and power consumption.

Energy budgets are one of the biggest challenges in the design of remote sensing and control platforms.

The microcontroller (MCU) now acts as the core of many low-energy and portable systems, but the pressure is constantly there to extend battery life while implementing a wider range of functions.