Power management is becoming ever more important as mobile data rates vastly increase and the complexity of the user experience, involving fancy transitions, High Definition movie playback, console quality gaming and so on drives ever more power processing and rendering capability.

The customer expectations of battery life and what they can do with their smartphones and tablets seeks to outpace the ability of battery technology and clever designers to keep up. The use of finite power resources becomes even more important when we look at the growing demand in the area of M2M and embedded applications pushing connectivity to new markets.

Renesas Mobile provides state of the art power management technology in all our platforms. Although today's SoCs have many power saving modes, the challenge is that developers have to optimize their software to use it for each and every use-case. However, the majority of our power management, in Renesas Mobile, is done at the hardware level.

Therefore, our platforms automatically and autonomously achieve very low power operation and long stand-by times without, time consuming and annoying software optimization for power saving being required. Though software designers should care about efficient implementation at the application level. Hardware based power management technology also contributes fine grain level power management when compared with software control based systems.

Power management of Renesas Mobile consists of 3 major technologies:

• Dynamic Clock Gating – Watching the activity of each module and clock tree. The clock supply is dynamically controlled.
• Dynamic Frequency Control – Operating frequency of each module is dynamically decreased to the required range, depending on their work load. This is effective for modules with a light work load.
• Dynamic Power Gating – Power Gating: Watching the standby modules, this technology dynamically stops the power supply. This is effective in reducing the leakage power.

All of three are controlled by hardware based without software control.