[Moved]Low power application means low current or low voltage??

[ANSA THOMAS]

What does a low power application exactly mean?does it mean that current is low or is it voltage?am a newbie..please help me:smile:

 

[MSBR]

Well, my understanding is that, DC power is a product of current and voltage. So low power means the effective product of the Current and Voltage remains low. For example, you can see data sheets of some ICs which claim that its design is a low power one working on 5V but drawing a current of the order of milli-Amps, making the overall power in the range of mW or so.

I hope that this helps.

Regards.
MSBR

 

[ashugtiwari]

A low power application is an embedded system or circuit where amount of power used is very low. The power is electronic is measured in Watts. So for eg. if a system uses 1W of power and another same system uses 2W of power, so the system with 1W of power usage is low power system.
Now power in electronic system is multiplication of applied voltage and current through circuit i.e.
P = V*I
So in a way, the power usage is directly proportional to both voltage and current keeping another entity as constant. So, if u have designed a system of spec A with 5V and 10mA current and same system with better components to reduce current usage to 1mA keeping supply constant at 5V. The power used by 1mA is 5mW and by 10mA is 50mW, so 5mW system is low power. But at any instant, either or both voltage and current can be low.

Most of systems today use 3.3V and lesser compared to 5V, so using low voltage automatically reduces power. Also, the improvement is made in terms of current consumption to very minimum which also reduces power usage.

Hope that helps.

 

[treez]

"low power" is often used with I.C.'s such as "low power op amps", which means the opamp draws very little bias current.

 

[Audioguru]

An LM358 dual opamp and an LM324 quad opamp are called "low power" because they use much less bias current than ordinary opamps.
But they produce crossover distortion because the output operates in class-B with an extremely low bias current instead of in class-AB that has much more but still a small bias current but no crossover distortion.
Here is what crossover distortion looks like when the signal is a pure sine wave: