MUNICH, Germany — Energy savings of up to 25 percent for home and medical appliances are the goal of the SmartPM research project. The effort focuses on developing system architectures, power modules and innovative design concepts for semiconductors.
SmartPM stands for 'Smart Power Management in Home and Health' and aims at better overall power efficiency for appliances. Basically, the figures regarding the energy savings potential in these application segments are known, but it illustrates the significance of the project's goal to repeat them: The energy consumption for electric motor drives used in ubiquitous appliances such as refrigerators, air-conditioning systems, washing machines and dishwashers could be reduced by up to 35 percent if electronic controls would be applied.
Those appliances are shipped in very large quantities: Every year, approximately 75 million washing machines, 90 million refrigerators, 65 million room air conditioning systems are shipped worldwide — along with some 95 million medical appliances ranging from ultrasound echographs to X-Ray machines.
Another subject to energy savings are computers from laptops to servers. More than 60 million servers are operated worldwide presently, consuming 36 Gigawatts of electrical energy. In large data centers (albeit not exactly part of the domestic environment), energy reduction for servers pays out twofold: Servers consuming less power also produce less heat. This in turn reduces the need to run large air conditioning systems.
In any way, with every kilowatt hour of electrical energy saved, CO2 emission is reduced by 540 grams. This is what the participants of the SmartPM project are committed to. They intend to get granular on a variety of topics ranging from system architectures to chip design approaches. At the chip architecture level, power-saving approaches for memory devices, power management ICs and driver circuits are subject to the research. At the semiconductor technology level, the research will focus on silicon, Silicon-on-Insulator (SoI), and Silicon Carbide (SiC).
With 18 research entities and commercial enterprises from nine countries collaborating in the project, SmartPM is a truly pan-European effort. Semiconductor companies participating are Infineon (managing), On Semiconductor, and STMicroelectronics. Among the research entities involved in the project are Consejo Superior da Investigaciones Scientificas from Spain, the Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), the Dublin City University (Ireland), Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (Germany), Stiftelsen Sintef (Norway) and Thales Research and Technology (France). The project will run until January 2012 and has a budget of €20 million (about $28.4 million). It is supported by a financial grant of about €3.3 million from ENIAC, the European nanoelectronics advisory council.
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