Complex Power Management: An Imperative for Modern System Design

Modern embedded systems designs emphasize increased system performance while reducing operating power consumption. Increasing performance is usually achieved by increasing the operating frequency or by using more powerful, higher density VLSI ICs (or both). However, both approaches increase the circuit board's power consumption. Consequently, advanced power management techniques are imperative to increase performance and reliability within a power budget.

Such systems include ATCA, CompactPCI, and Wireless Base Station. In these systems, overall system-level power consumption is controlled by a processor in the control card called the shelf manager. These shelf managers determine if a line card plugged into the backplane should be turned on.