Not so fast my friend: Is near-threshold computing the answer for power reduction of wireless devices?

In addition to battery life, power is limiting the performance, feature set, and form factor of most mobile communication devices. Many advanced low power techniques have been developed to deal with the problem, however, the cost of these techniques in terms of area, time to market, and quality has to be traded off against the power savings of each. Near threshold Computing (NTC) is a good example of this. NTC is showing great promise as a technique to extend battery life through optimizing energy efficiency. However, the end-user´s overall experience is still the most important metric and that experience is influenced by performance, response time and battery life; not to mention price. Therefore NTC is limited in its impact to certain mobile products and applications after all the tradeoffs have been considered.