That much was clear at a recent event hosted by NXP BV (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) to commemorate the shipping of the companys 400 millionth so called GreenChip, a power management IC that targets power supplies used in PCs and consumer electronics gear.

As Rene Penning de Vries, senior vice president and chief technology officer at NXP noted, We have developed and are producing the third generation of these devices, and over the past decade, have made a dramatic contribution towards environmental sustainability.

He said the first parts were shipped in 1997, designed to offer improved standby power for CRT TVs and monitors, with a second generation, from 2001, focused on increasing the user time and power efficiency of, for example notebooks and PCs, set top boxes and LCD TVs.

The third generation of GreenChip products is bringing even better performance on standby power efficiency, with special emphasis on desktops, notebook adapters and LCD TVs, and we are designing the fourth-generation range, said Penning de Vries. He stressed that if the third-generation parts were installed in all PCs around the world, three standard, one-gigawatt power stations could be decommissioned.

These parts, he notes, are the only ones for PC power supplies certified by EPRI for the 85PLUS standard, which targets increasing the overall power efficiency of a power supply up to 90 percent, and thus potentially reducing energy losses for a desktop PC supply by up to 50 percent.