6.2 Multiple (Thermal) Redundancy

An approach to reduce standby heat resulting from leakage currents is to shut down unused parts of a device. This is done by switching off the supply voltage for the particular device region, so that this part is set to idle unless the supply voltage is switched on again. This system is currently used in highly sophisticated microprocessors, where several arithmetic or floating point units can be set to idle separately. Therefore this feature is highly desirable for high performance devices to cool down certain device regions, but it is also a common method for devices used in battery powered applications.




Stefan Holzer 2007-11-19