Speaking green
02 December 2008
SiTel’s ‘green VoIP’ ICs claim to cut power consumption in half.
VoIP is rapidly becoming the preferred telephony option for businesses as it offers significant potential to reduce costs. However, unlike traditional phones, VoIP handsets are powered from mains electricity or via routers / servers through Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). This makes VoIP power consumption an issue for companies seeking to minimise their electricity bills. At the same time, many governments are considering limiting the maximum power consumption for devices connected to the grid.
To help manufacturers address these concerns, SiTel Semiconductor has released modified versions of its Enterprise VoIP development kits, featuring hardware and software enhancements that optimise the use of power within VoIP applications. The kit provides a single, flexible platform for creating a range of wired and wireless enterprise VoIP solutions. The platform has a modular hardware architecture made up of a single motherboard (SC1445x VoIP processor) plus a number of optional daughter boards; Ethernet, LCD screen and keypad, Foreign eXchange Subscriber (FXS), Foreign eXchange Office (FXO), WiFi and DECT radio modules. On the software side, the kit uses the industry-standard and royalty-free uClinux operating system, which is complemented by an array of open-source applications. Furthermore, it includes SiTel’s own Natalie DECT protocol stack software incorporating all industry accepted cordless telephony protocols (DECT, DECT 6.0, 2.4 GHz, 5.8 GHz and CAT-iq).
The company has also recently announced that its SC14450 processor has been shown to reduce power consumption in VoIP applications by as much as 50%. Tests on a dual 10/100 Ethernet VoIP desktop phone based on this ‘green VoIP’ processor revealed that power consumption during a call was less than 800mW; approximately half the power specification of any VoIP phone on the market today, according to SiTel. Indeed, the net power consumption measured after PoE was found to be 569.4mW in idle mode, and 785.0mW and 796.5mW during G.711 and G.722 calls respectively. The processor uses the company’s multi-core architecture to deliver 240MIPS of processing power. It features a 16bit CompactRISC processor plus two user-programmable Gen2DSPs. It can run the various VoIP audio codecs and best-in-class acoustic echo cancellation while still having enough headroom for the TCP/IP networking stack plus assorted SIP and other embedded applications. In addition, the SC14450 supports a variety of external memories, and features an integrated class D amplifier, power and battery management options, a white LED driver and a wide variety of peripheral interfaces including master / slave PCM, UART, SPI, dual-access bus and USB client.
A recent draft version of a European Commission Regulation on ecodesign (implementing Directive 2005/32/EC) proposes limiting the standby power consumption of domestic and office devices to 2W if the device has an information or status display and 1W otherwise. A future second phase will apparently further tighten these limits to 1W and 0.5W. Phones based on SiTel’s green VoIP processors currently meet these proposed requirements.
“SiTel is committed to reducing the impact our operations have on the environment and delivering best-in-class power consumption,” said Mark De Clercq, Product Marketing Manager at SiTel. “These power consumption figures are 50% lower than anything we have seen on the market to date. With the SC14450, manufacturers can easily develop solutions that are cheaper for their customers to run and help reduce global demand for electricity,” he added.
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