ecochip™ Achieving Almost 0W Standby Power Consumption for Home Appliances

Toshiba has developed the ecochip™, a lowpower receiver chip for remote-control systems, incorporating an analog front-end (AFE) circuit and signal detection/relay switch controlling schemes in the digital domain. Using these functions, the ecochip™ makes it possible to reduce the standby power consumption of home appliances to almost 0W by turning off the relay switch connected to the power line in the standby state. When the chip receives a wakeup signal it turns on the relay switch, even when the power line is disconnected. We have developed a mixed-signal processing technology for filtering and other functions by optimizing the partition between the analog and digital blocks, and a digitally assisted calibration scheme for process variations of analog circuits in order to attain a total power consumption of only 150µW.

The ecochip™ incorporates both infrared and wireless remote-control systems. The infrared version of the ecochip™ remote-control system has been adopted for the REGZA 32BE3 liquid crystal display (LCD) TV launched on the market in December 2011. The standby power consumption of the 32BE3 is about 1/1,000 that of conventional TVs, which means almost 0W. The wireless version of the ecochip™ remote-control system has been applied to an experimental wakeup system for remote-controlled network equipment. Experiments on the wireless version of the ecochip™ confirmed that it achieves successful performance in contributing to the reduction of power consumption.

This work was partly supported by MIC of Japan.

ecochip™ low-power receiver chip(left)
REGZA 32BE3 equipped with ecochip™ (right)