Power efficiency is the single biggest challenge facing the mobile handset industry, and collaboration is needed to enable the industry to deliver a required 100X improvement in power efficiency for mobile devices, according to a keynote presentation at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) here Monday (Feb. 8).

Greg Delagi, senior vice president of wireless at Texas Instruments Inc., said the future vision of always on, always connected mobile computing depends heavily on engineers’ ability to improve power efficiency through techniques such as ultra-low voltage and power circuits, high-efficiency DC-DC and DAC converters, SRAM, non-volatile memory and parallel architectures. He outlined promising research in areas such as ultra-low power video codecs, DC-DC converters, medical processors and energy scavenging—the ability to generate power from the surrounding environment—which he called the “holy grail.”

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