Overview

Personal computers (PCs) and the Internet have become an integral part of every day life in the home, office, and on the road. The ability to readily access the latest information has become a baseline user expectation. Meeting these expectations requires that the next generation of PC be instantly available to both the user and to communications applications. At the same time, the PC must become more efficient in its use of electricity as more computers come on-line with a limited supply of clean, inexpensive energy.

The Environmental Protection Agency s ENERGY STAR office equipment labeling program motivates PC manufacturers to pay close attention to the energy consumption of their products while the products are in the Standby state. In the past, with BIOS-based power management techniques, power savings typically came at the expense of system stability, connectivity, and/or performance. Today s generation of power-managed PCs brings together many new technology ingredients that enable user expectations of power-efficient PCs to be met for the volume PC market. A power-managed architecture ensures that the PC gets all the power it requires for full performance when being used, yet aggressively manages devices that are not in use to consume less power.

The most challenging technical hurdle to overcome is achieving extremely low power consumption while maintaining connectivity. The overall goal of having the PC be instantly available while also maximizing energy savings requires the designer to make implementation tradeoffs.

Technological advances in computer hardware and software allow us today to design a...