As more broadband infrastructure comes online and as more people purchase mobile phones with gaming features, designing for low power will become even more important to the growing electronic gaming industry.

Akrout said that the industry is showing explosive growth, with over 145 million people playing computer and video games today. The industry will only grow larger as broadband becomes more widely available so gamers can play against each other via the Internet, he predicted.

Mobile phones are expected to represent another area of growth, Akrout said, as friends use them to play video games with one another. In Japan alone, over 30 million people use their cell phones to play video games with their friends, he said. This wireless application area in particular requires microprocessors that are high in performance to allow for fluid gaming. They also must run at low power to allow the phone's battery to last longer.

Microprocessors and system-on-chips (SoCs) with those qualities can be implemented on several silicon processes, Akrout said, including IBM silicon-on-insulator/copper processes.

To meet the performance and power demands of those application areas, a low-power group must be added to the MPU or SoC design team, Akrout said. Such a group would run tests to ensure that a given MPU design was hitting its power requirements.

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