Customer Reviews

Power Management in Mobile Devices (Communications Engineering)

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This is a quite useful book for anyone who needs to deal with power consumption in portable devices, sensor networks, or other low-power applications. The book covers a broad array of topics: transistor process technology, ASIC design methodology for low-power circuits, software optimization, batteries, regulators, and displays. For the reader who is generally familiar with embedded systems, this book is a very nice quick way to catch up on what's being done in all the aspects of power-sensitive system design. While the material is not terribly deep or mathematical, some background in electrical and/or software engineering is needed to benefit from many of the discussions. A nice list of references is provided at the end of each chapter.

Cavils are mostly minor. The book is stylistically disfigured by a number of incomplete and ungrammatical sentences. Some passages read as if they were lifted directly from vendor sales collateral; it would have been nice to have the author's critical evaluation of products rather than or in addition to the vendor's marketing materials. In some of the circuit diagrams, boxes are used for resistors and/or inductors, instead of the standard symbols -- minor but irritating. The introductory chapters are somewhat awkward and repetitive, but most readers will already be familiar with the problems of power use in portable devices (that's why they are reading the book), so they don't really need this material anyway.

This is a good overview of techniques used in low power, ideal perhaps as an undergraduate or recent grad textbook. But it lacks sufficient technical details for the reader to be able to immediately put those techniques into practice. It'll teach them the right buzzwords and maybe they'll be able to sound like they know what they're talking about after reading, but they'll only know enough to be dangerous, not to be useful. For example, dynamic process and temperature compensation merits all of one paragraph or nearly 8 lines of text. It tells you what it is, but to do it justice would take a chapter not a paragraph.

For a more in-depth (but less breadth) take on low-power techniques in SoC I would recommend the ARM-Synopsys Low Power Methodology Manual, which also has the advantage that you can download the PDF free from Synopsys as well as buying the book from Amazon if you so choose:
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