How Green is my iPhone?

Have you ever wondered just how green an iPhone really is?

Well today’s blog post was sent to me by Dr Marc Dussault, The Exponential Growth Strategist. It’s an Infographic taken from DailyInfographic.com. At Successful Endeavours, we’re always interested in recycling and sustainable technologies and solutions. You will have seen some of that is past posts on how to be greener with the Electronics Design including Electronics Design for Green Manufacture? , Green Electronics Strategies – Reduce Power While Awake and Green Electronics Strategies – Sleep Saves Energy .

For this post we will use the infographic to specifically look at how GREEN the iPhone 4 is versus the iPhone 3G from the perspective of the production, use and disposal of the phone.  Some key figures I noted or calculated are:

• Production Emissions are 57% of all emissions in the iPhone 4 product lifecycle
• 58.9% of the weight of the iPhone 4 is in materials that are easily recycled
• Packaging Reductions save 14% in transport fuel

The Packaging Reductions are an excellent example of simple things we can all do to save on emissions. And Apple offer a full recycling service that is aimed at being environmentally friendly which is also a great thing to put in place.

Electronics Manufacturing Energy

The area that stands out for me is the energy that is consumed in production of the iPhone 4. This is not an iPhone 4 specific problem but a general problem for Electronics Manufacture. If we want to talk about Green Electronics, then this has to include not just the product we use and the Electronics Waste and Recycling / WEEE, but we also have to get to the point where the Production Emissions, the energy to produce a product, is way less than the energy to use the product. This is a huge issue for Battery Operated Products, such as the emerging Electric Vehicle market, where the Production Emissions for just the battery can be close to half of all the Production Emissions.

Enjoy the infographic from the dailyinfographic Keeping it Green.

How Green is the iPhone 4

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd

LED Lighting

10 years ago, LED Lighting was set to revolutionise the general illumination market. LEDs, also known as Light Emitting Diodes, had already taken over are the role as indicator panel illuminators and user interfaces on industrial, commercial and consumer products.  All the trend lines indicated that they would eclipse the incandescent light globe for cost per watt within a decade.

So what went wrong?

LED Lighting - Purple LED Diffused

More power without more light

As the technology was scaled up, the power levels rose and the expected requirements of more heatsinking were being dealt with and all seemed on track for LEDs to take over the world of lighting. But then a snag was hit. The technology got to a point where the efficiency dropped off as more current flowed through the diode. Companies like CREE, LumiLEDs and OSRAM pursued different and moderately successful strategies to try and overcome these limitations but the pace of progress slowed dramatically.

All of this points to a technical barrier we still don’t fully understand but are chipping away at.

Same light less cost

The other issue is the cost per watt in terms of the manufacturing cost of LEDs. The manufacturing process typically uses Sapphire or Silicon Carbide substrated which makes LEDs more expensive to manufacture than conventional semiconductors.  There are several ways to improve this and they are all being pursued in parallel.

The first is the move toward organic semiconductors as covered in my recent post on Printed Electronics I looked at much lower cost techniques for making semiconductors and organic LEDs are one of the possible end products from these techniques. The CSIRO are world leaders in these technologies and are actively pursuing research into flexible electronics including organic displays and lighting. Here the challenge is creating a robust manufacturing technique that produces high volume, low cost lighting. The efficiency may not be as high but the cost per watt is much lower. Organic Semiconductors and organic LEDs will continue to be part of the solution. You can read about their efforts in CSIRO Flexible Electronics.

CSIRO Flexible Electronics

The second move is toward reducing the costs of conventional LED manufacture by eliminating the more costly steps of the process. A recent breakthrough was announced by Bridgelux and reportied in IEEE Spectrum will permit the manufacture of LEDs on silicon substrates.  In Silicon Is Key to Quest for $5 LED Lightbulb the breakthrough is described and the promise is good. This also does not address the efficiency problem but again reduces the cost per watt.

Bridgelux Silicon Substrate LED

Efficiency is the final frontier

The final chapter is yet to be written because the breakthrough we have all hoped for has not yet arrived. In the meantime the problem is being tackled from many sides and advances are being made on multiple technical fronts. LED lighting is an important part of the strategy to reduce our Carbon Footprint.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Making LEDs

There are a lot of processing steps that go into the Electronics Manufacture of a Light Emitting Diode or LED. OSRAM have released a video showing the processing steps that go into making an LED.  Check it out below.

The LED increasingly becomes the light source of choice for most lighting applications as we look to Reduce Energy Use and our Carbon Footprint.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Carbon Nanotubes replace Solder Pads

Recent breakthroughs in nanotechnology could change the way Printed Circuit Boards, PCBs,  are made and this could start happening soon. If you either the Design PCBs or Manufacture PCBs then you will want to keep up with this new technology that uses Nanotape PCB Pads .

Here is a picture showing how the NanoTape structures differ from conventional Solder Pads. Although they look the same from the outside, the internal geometry shows the higher thermal and electrical conduction created by the Carbon Nanotubes. This can significantly help in product miniaturisation and for high power designs where both the enhanced thermal and electrical performance will improve the efficiency.

NanoTape replaces solder pads

Like all new technologies, there will be teething problems but this has the potential to overcome the Tin Whisker issues that plagued PCBs before the introduction of Lead to Solder and which have emerged again with the move to RoHS compliance and the use of Lead Free Solder.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Paper Electronics Devices

Recent breakthroughs at Harvard Labs have led to the creation of a paper based accelerometer that matches the sensitivity of silicon based MEMS accelerometers so common in air bags and the Nintendo Wii system.

Paper Accelerometer Could Mean Disposable Devices

The full article can be read on the IEEE website at Paper Accelerometer Could Mean Disposable Devices.

There are two major problems with manufacturing silicon based sensors.  The first is the cost of the process itself and the second is the chemical waste and energy consumption.  So devices based on this new approach are not only cheaper to make but also have significant Environmental Benefits.

In Paper Electronics Set for Breakthrough we see other applications described such as batteries. So there are potential benefits for both consumers and Electronics Manufacturers from these new Paper Electronics technologies.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

This post is a summary of an article I wrote for the latest AMTIL Australian Manufacturing Technology magazine which came out in print edition today and can also be read online.  Go to page 40.

And here is a picture taken of a Solar Systems concentrated Solar Power Dish. We were involved in software upgrades to the dish controller.  It produced 114KWhr of power on an August day at Fosterville, near Bendigo and this picture was taken on that day.

Solar Systems Dish on sun at Fosterville

Energy Storage

The biggest issue with electricity is that it is hard to store. The Electrical Grid delivers power on demand and manages the generators to maintain the frequency and voltage while delivering the required power to satisfy the demand. Quite a juggling act.  And while there are schemes like the Snowy Mountains Hydro where we can pump water uphill to consume power then let it flow downhills and run turbines to produce power, most power is managed at the generator directly.

Wind Power, Solar Photo Voltaic and Solar Concentrated are the primary renewable energy sources we will look at here, and they all provide a fluctuating supply.  You can’t easily crank them up or down with the demand. So we still need a base supply to do the balancing act.  Depending on our approach, it is estimated that the limit for these fluctuating supply types is between 8% and 30% of the total grid capacity.

Carbon Footprint

This represents how much carbon is releases into the atmosphere for a particular activity.  The top emitters of carbon are:

• livestock, principally sheep and cattle
• power generation
• transport (road, rail, air, sea)
• industrial processes
• land clearing, deforestation and agriculture

In Australia, 50% of our emissions come from power generation as we use a lot of brown coal which also happens to be one of the most polluting ways to generate power on mass. This is followed closely by transport.  So you can see why power generation and transport are primary focuses for improving our carbon footprint.

There are only a few ways to improve this. These are:

1. use less power – which creates the opportunity for more energy efficient devices to be created or alternative ways of doing things such as the use of smarter appliances that conserve energy use or even cooperate with the grid to use power at the best possible time
2. reuse existing energy – heat exchangers in air conditioning systems are an example of this
3. create energy in more efficient ways – new generator technologies or moving from dirtier sources to cleaner sources
4. create energy in ways that does not use carbon, or uses a lot less of it

Because in Australia the creation of electricity is our primary source of greenhouse emissions we will focus on this area for the rest of the article.

Australia is ranked 5th in overall greenhouse gas emissions per capita and we are the highest per capita emitter of the industrialised nations so it is in our interest to develop alternatives to our current high emitting energy infrastructure.  This is also where some major manufacturing opportunities arise for Australian industries.

Australian Manufacturing Opportunities

One of the leading contributors to greenhouse gas emissions is sea freight. So the classic Australian model of digging it up, shipping it overseas and shipping value added goods or materials back is a poor strategy when you consider the greenhouse gases produced. There will be an increasing advantage of doing the value add locally when reducing the total carbon footprint becomes important.

Here are some examples of successful local manufacture of alternative energy products in Australia today.  This is a very cursory list:

• Australian Solar Manufacturing is importing silicon cells and manufacturing complete TUV approved panels in Hallam, Victoria.
• Solar Systems are world leaders in concentrated solar silicon photovoltaics and are putting together the world’s largest concentrated solar electric facility in Mildura.
• Latronics and Solar Energy Australia both locally manufacture grid tied central inverters

Here are some opportunities to consider in the near future.  This is just scratching the surface:

• BP Solar are working with the CSIRO on deep discharge lead acid batteries for use in energy storage for remote solar installations. This will lead to new battery technology and new manufacturing opportunities.
• CSIRO are world leaders in organic photovoltaics and organic semiconductors. VICOSC is established to commercial the organic photovoltaics and there will be many opportunities that come from this initiative.
• Existing mounting and installation hardware for photovoltaics is labour intensive to use. There are opportunities for smarter and more elegant systems to make installation more modular and straight forward. This can work with local or imported panels.
• Most grid connected inverters are imported but there are concerns about both build quality and whether they are all compliant with Australian Standards.  The world market for inverters is set to grow by a factor of 10 over the next 5 years so there are also export opportunities.
• Biofuels will become increasingly more important and there will be many opportunities related to this at both the production and consumption end of the process.

As you can see from the list, there are opportunities in both the core technology manufacture and also in the supporting systems and hardware.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile at Ray Keefe. This post is Copyright © 2011  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Casey Business Awards

We already let you know that we are finalists in 2 of the 9 categories for the City Of Casey inaugural Casey Business Awards in our post about being Casey Business Awards Finalists. The Casey Business Awards categories we are finalists in are:

• Manufacturer Of The Year
• Business and Professional Services

The news has been picked up by one of our local Newspapers, The Greater Dandenong Weekly, who ran the following article about us and the other finalists.  It is good to see so many strong contenders and our economy certainly needs strong businesses to continue to give both the employment and prosperity we have come to enjoy.

The Journal - Successful Endeavours

Our congratulations go out to the other finalists and we will find out who the winners are on Friday 27th August at the Casey Business Awards gala dinner.

It is good to see the Electronics Design, Embedded Software Development and Low Cost Electronics Manufacture featuring so strongly in the local Australian economy.  We especially note that Australian Solar Manufacturing is also a finalist in the Manufacturer of the Year category and we wish Jain and Janice Lal all the best with their nomination.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Electronics Design for Green Manufacture

This is not as straight forward a topic as it might at first seem to be.  And this is because there isn’t yet a unified agreement on exactly what Green Manufacture means.  And like most Design Issues, you cannot do Electronics Design without clear requirements.  So what are the requirements?

Here are some Green Manufacture requirements or targets:

• reduce product Power Consumption
• reduce manufacturing Power Consumption
• add Renewable Energy options to the product
• add Renewable Energy options to the manufacture process
• reduce pollution or waste in the manufacture process
• reduce energy involved in upstream or downstream processes
• reduce pollution or waste in the upstream or downstream processes
• increase product life
• increase product utility
• increase manufacturing plant utilisation

I guess you can see the dilemma.  It can be hard to know which target to aim for.  Am I doing the Electronics Design with the product, process, life cycle or ecosystem issues as the primary concern?  And how do I balance these concerns?

Here is one excellent article that also discusses this topic Green Supply Line.

Electronics Design can be Green

One major thing we can do is reduce the product Power Consumption.  We are coming out of a phase where a mains plug pack power supply was considered an ideal way to avoid compliance costs when designing new products.  This has led to a proliferation of low efficiency always on powered devices.  A recent look under my desk reveals the problem we have as Product Developers where every device I use is either USB Powered or mains plug pack powered.

So a first step is to review this whole approach to supplying power to devices.  We have made steady gains in the area of Power Consumption reduction for the devices themselves.  Now it is time to do a similar thing on the Power Supply side.

Energy Harvesting

This is a new area that hasn’t yet reached mainstream development.  The idea is that you can utilise the ambient environment to get power for free.  Or at least you aren’t directly requiring extra Power Generation.  Hence the name, Energy Harvesting.

How you do it and the Electronics Design and Electronics Technology required to make it work are still being defined but there has been some interesting new progress.  Some key players are:

Linear Technology – new Energy Harvesting Integrated Circuit

Enocean – are front runners in bringing Self Powered Wireless devices to the market

What is Energy Harvesting?

This is where we use Electronics Design and Electronics Devices to generate power from the Ambient Environment.  The result is a product that doesn’t need to be plugged in and recharges itself automatically. Some of the Energy Sources that are used are:

• Light
• Thermal differentials
• Vibration
• Chemistry
• Pressure differentials
• Air Flow

One example of a product that does this is the Enocean Light Switch where you can just put it where you want it.  And if you change your mind, just move it. Now wiring required.

Right now the technology is still more expensive and so take up is slow.  But as it develops and the price comes down that will change.

We are in for some interesting times.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years. For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Electronics Design To Save Energy

We have looked at how Low Power Electronics is a green strategy because it reduces the amount of power that has to be generated.  And then we looked at a range of options for Reducing Electronics Power Consumption.

Now we are into specifics.  The last post looked at Sleep Modes For Microcontrollers and how extending the Sleep Period and reducing the Sleep Current could dramatically Reduce Electronics Power Consumption.

Saving Electronics Power When Awake

The next logical step is to ensure that Power Consumption when awake is also reduced as much as possible.  This can be a little tricky to get right as it can sometimes eliminate all the benefits you built up with you sleep strategy.  The reasons for this are:

• you can use Analogue Electronics to reduce software power requirements but it has to be turned off during Sleep Mode
• if you do turn the power off to Analogue Electronics then there is a Settling Time after it is powered up
• using Smart Electronics Chips can increase overall Quiescent Current
• unless the Startup Time and Shutdown Time are quick, these can dominate the Power Consumption

Now there are some Software Architecture issues that affect these, especially the last one, but we will look at that in another post.  For the last part of this post we will address the Electronics Design issues that have been raised here.

Electronics Design – To Save Power

Electronics Design can address these Power Consumption issues.  Here is an example of a Power Consumption curve where an RC Time Constant must be taken into account to minimise average Power Consumption.

RC Time Constant affect Power Consumption

Here is a list of general strategies to select from to reduce Power Consumption:

• using the lowest feasible Clock Rate so Clocked Devices use less power
• using shorter Settling Times particularly by controlling RC Time Constants
• select semiconductors for lowest overall Quiescent Current taking awake and sleep operation into account
• ensure streamlined Startup and Shutdown operation

The overall Quiescent Current issues often gives the most difficulty.  This can be addressed through Design Simulation either by SPICE, Software Modelling or a spreadsheet.  For simpler systems the spreadsheet is often the easiest solution to implement.  For very Software Intensive Systems the Software Modelling approach is the most reliable method.  This will allow you to construct scenarios and be able to predict the Power Consumption implications for each of them.

For our Electronics Design and System Test methodology we often create a full system Software Model and so it is easy to use this same Software Model to accumulate the power consumption as it runs.  This can also be automated and so simulate months of operation very quickly.

Next we will look at the role of Embedded Software in ensuring Power Consumption remains as low as possible.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

How Does Sleep Save Energy?

For this post, we will look specifically at Embedded Software techniques to save power and energy.  This is a well known Power Saving Strategy which doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves.  It is also something you have to design into the Power Management Plan from the beggining.

For this example, we will use the MSP430 from TI which has some of the best Power Saving and Power Consumption figures in the industry.  We have used them to create devices that run from a pair of AAA batteries for 2 years and which have time based control algorithms so that they can’tbe used in a purely event driven mode.  Here is how it works:

Low Power Sleep Mode

This shows the power consumption versus time.  In Low Power Sleep Mode the consumption is close to zero.  Almost no power consumed.  Then depending on what is happening it wakes up to varying degrees.

Get the best Electronic Sleep

So this is how you take advantage of this:

• make the time between wake ups as long as possible
• make the time awake as short as possible
• only turn on the peripherals needs for a particular wake period

Now if you system only has to wake once every minute then you can get low power operation from a lot of different processors.  If it wakes many times a second then you need a processor that gives you lots of ways to reduce power during wake, reduce the time awake, and increase the interval between wakes.

MSP430 Sleep

So back to the MSP430. It has Power Conservation features that allow it to do all three better than most.  Here is the list:

• Digitally Controlled Oscillator DCO allows it to wake and run quickly
• Can run a Timer from a 32KHz crystal making interval timing very low power
• Can use the DCO to set the run speed and so shorten the wake time
• Lot’s of Power Down Modes so you can always find one that suits your application
• Peripherals can be Shut Down when not in use
• Can run down to 1.8V – more on that later but it can also help here

Low Power System Architecture

To take advantage of all this, you have to develop the System Architecture so that  takes advantage of this.  An example from a very long life application we did runs like this:

• 32Hz Oscillator runs a timer that generates a 1 second wake
• User input keys set up to wake on change of state from high to low
• Use DCO at 1MHz to quickly wake, execute & sleep again
• Use State Machines to allow modules to execute predictably with eratic timing
• Have early exit tests to prevent unnecessary Code Execution

The result is an application that runs a process with User Interaction, LED Indicators, and a 2 week cycle where the average Power Consumption is 20uA at 2.7V or 54uW.  Of this, less than half is the processor executing the software and the single biggest energy use is the intermittently flashed LED Indicators.

To learn more, check out this more comprehensive article on “Low power MCU selection criteria and sleep mode implementation” from embedded.com which provides more examples.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.