Better control of power supplies and motors could help save significant amounts of energy in places like data centers, and Freescale Semiconductor says it’s come up with just the solution: a family of next-generation digital signal controllers, or DSCs.

Even small improvements in the efficiency of power supplies, motors and lighting systems — sources of huge energy demand — through the use of digital control systems could have a major impact on global energy consumption, according to Freescale. It claims the newest member of its DSC portfolio, the MC56F84xx, can help increase system stability for motor control applications. And increased system stability means motors that run more efficiently and quietly (in a dishwasher or other appliance, for example).

Better stability also means less energy waste and heat, which means designers can reduce costs and system size. For example, a server room with power supplies that generate less heat requires less energy for cooling, and circuit board designs that have less heat to dissipate can be smaller (improved power density), reducing system size and cost and allowing “miniaturization” of the application.

“With increased awareness and concern about worldwide energy use, designers are seeking ways to minimize energy consumption,” said Reza Kazerounian, senior vice president and general manager of Freescale’s Microcontroller Solutions Group. “With the MC56F84xx family, we have re-examined and improved every aspect of a DSC — upgrading the core to 32 bits, increasing peripheral flexibility and precision and simplifying design methodologies — to provide our customers a faster, smarter way to manage energy use.”

The MC56F84xx family is targeted at high-end digital power supplies, such as those used for servers in data centers. Improving the energy efficiency of data centers will become increasingly critical as businesses and consumers continue to migrate to cloud computing. As cloud use increases during the next few years, the average size of the data centers hosting the cloud infrastructure also will grow dramatically, in turn increasing energy consumption. With the price of electricity increasing and the typical electricity cost for a server rack equaling nearly 20 percent of its overall cost of ownership, data center owners will continue to look for more energy-efficient solutions to help reduce their total costs.

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