TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2008

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Greening Consumer Electronics: Moving Away From Bromine and Chlorine

Presents case studies of seven electronics companies that have engineered environmental solutions that eliminate the use of most brominated and chlorinated chemicals that generate toxic materials. Discusses global standards and regulations

A survey of energy saving techniques for mobile computers

Portable products such as pagers, cordless and digital cellular telephones, personal audio equipment, and laptop computers are increasingly being used. Because these applications are battery powered, reducing power consumption is vital. In this report we first give a survey of techniques for accomplishing energy reduction on the hardware level such as: low voltage components, use of sleep or idle modes, dynamic control of the processor clock frequency, clocking regions, and disabling unused peripherals. System- design techniques include minimizing external accesses, minimizing logic state transitions, and system partitioning using application-specific coprocessors. Then we review energy reduction techniques in the design of operating systems, including communication protocols, caching, scheduling and QoS management. Finally, we give an overview of policies to optimize the code of the application for energy consumption and make it aware of power management functions. Applications play a critical role in the user's experience of a power-managed system. Therefore, the application and the operating system must allow a user to control the power management. Remarkably, it appears that some energy preserving techniques not only lead to a reduced energy consumption, but also to more performance

TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Workload-Based Configuration of MEMS-Based Storage Devices for Mobile Systems

Because of its small form factor, high capacity, and expected low cost, MEMS-based storage is a suitable storage technology for mobile systems. However, flash memory may outperform MEMS-based storage in terms of performance, and energy-efficiency. The problem is that MEMS-based storage devices have a large number (i.e., thousands) of heads, and to deliver peak performance, all heads must be deployed simultaneously to access each single sector. Since these devices are mechanical and thus some housekeeping information is needed for each head, this results in a huge capacity loss and increases the energy consumption of MEMS-based storage with respect to flash. We solve this problem by proposing new techniques to lay out data in MEMS-based storage devices. Data layouts represent optimizations in a design space spanned by three parameters: the number of active heads, sector parallelism, and sector size. We explore this design space and show that by exploiting knowledge of the expected workload, MEMS-based devices can employ all heads, thus delivering peak performance, while decreasing the energy consumption and compromising only a little on the capacity. Our exploration shows that MEMS-based storage is competitive with flash in most cases, and outperforms flash in a few cases