powermanagement

Powermanagement, commonly written as power management, is the set of techniques and technologies used to control and optimize the consumption of electrical power in electronic devices and systems. It encompasses hardware design, firmware, and software strategies to balance energy use with performance and reliability. Effective power management extends battery life in mobile devices, reduces heat in desktops and servers, and lowers operating costs in data centers.

Key techniques include dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) to reduce power while maintaining performance, clock gating and power gating to shut unused circuits, and low-power sleep or hibernate states when idle. Power management also covers battery management and charging in portable devices, thermal management, and the design of power management integrated circuits (PMICs) and power delivery networks.

On the software side, operating systems implement power policies and sleep criteria, user preferences, and task scheduling that favors energy efficiency. Standards and interfaces such as ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), PMBus, and IPMI provide common methods to query and control hardware power states. In data centers, power capping and workload consolidation improve efficiency, while monitoring and telemetry enable optimization.

Common metrics include energy consumption, power draw, energy per operation, and battery life. Challenges include balancing performance, latency, and thermal constraints, accurately measuring consumption, and ensuring security and reliability of power control. Power management remains a major focus of consumer electronics, enterprise IT, and automotive and embedded systems.