这些专业人士并没有被他们所不关心的生态设计问题搞得冷漠。相反，他们的反应证明了他们日常工作的复杂性。芯片和电路板的设计人员认识到，他们不仅要将时间和精力重点放在那些直接影响到他们设计的要求上。生态限制也对他们的工作存在影响，但这只是在不断缩小功率预算的幌子下。对于必须将权力分配和预算执行放在第一位的管理人员来说，生态影响在芯片系统级架构权衡中体现明显。
部分问题是，当今敏感的生态条件是相当新潮的，他们可以应用在不同的上下文中。例如，谈论“绿色”电子产品以前曾经是一个十分时尚的话题？现在，许多公司和大学的首选条件是可持续的电子设计。这不仅仅只是一个语义研究。许多人使用生态、环保和可持续发展等意味同样事情的名词进行互换。但他们这样做吗？
生态和环保电子设计是指电子产品对环境问题具有敏感性的开发，构建和服务。关键的目标是进行成功的环保设计，以实现能源和材料使用的更大效率。对于芯片和电路板设计，这种设计可以直接实现硬件和软件的低功耗——而这也反过来满足系统设计人员的愿望。
可持续设计是指电子设计过程涵盖了产品的整个生命周期。事实上，设计是一个使用不当的用词，因为它表明只有产品完整生命周期的一部分。出于这个原因，我应该将“设计”修改“发展”。但考虑到语言的连续性，我仍然使用更常见更通俗的“设计”。
可持续设计的目的是为了与经济、社会和生态的可持续性达到平衡。传统意义上，多学科工程的社会将重点放在该定义的第一个和最后一个方面，即经济和生态对产品设计的影响。在过去，经济可持续的产品设计一直占统治地位。现在，情况也是如此——经济规则优先，但现在与过去的情况存在不同。由于报废处理费用，公共观念等方面的原因，生态影响有了更明确的经济成本，这意味着可持续性现在必须被看作是产品设计解决方案的一种额外限制。
考虑到替代能源技术的例子。能源生产和储存也许是芯片和电路板可持续设计的最重要方面。但是，可持续能源和替代能源系统必须符合经济现实。如果一个设计可以利用现有的发电和储存技术，则设计师就没有理由寻找替代能源的办法——例如太阳能、能源收集等。除非考虑整个产品生命周期的成本，否则没有理由进行能源替代。可持续发展正在这种条件下改变平衡方程。更多的立法要求制造商支付报废处置。这些法律使报废成本直接叠加到设计周期的最前沿。您可以称呼此种设计为可持续性设计方法（DFS）。
不论其使用什么名称，产品报废处理成本的增加提高了产品的前端成本，按照目前的技术，如果可替代能源能够提供所需的能量并降低将来报废处理大的费用，这种可持续设计方法将有效推动可替代能源的使用。
这对于新片和电路板设计者意味着什么？他们必须在设计水平的架构过程中增添一套新的权衡分析方案，负责审查设计中替代能源的使用和报废处理成本的计算。对于这种情况的发生，工程师们必须对这些影响的冲击有一个清楚的认识。
你是一名与电子设计中可持续和环保的额外限制掰手腕的设计师吗？让我们通过学习那些低功耗和系统级的技术问题，使您产生更多的问题，并参与到社区中来寻找到解决办法。
原文出处：
If you ask most engineers about green or sustainable electronics design, they’ll shrug their shoulders and say, “So what?” If you ask those same engineers about low power design, they’ll lean their shoulders forward and say, “Continue.” And if you ask their managers, the response will be, “You mean system-level design, don’t you?”
These professionals are not being callous in their indifference toward ecological design issues. Rather, they’re responses are testament to the complexity with which they work every day. Chip and board designers realize that they only have time and mental resources to focus on those requirements that directly impact their designs. Ecological constraints do impact their work, but only under the guise of an ever shrinking power budget. For their managers – who must allocate the power and performance budgets in the first place – the ecological impacts are manifest in system level architectural trade-offs.
Part of the problem is that today’s eco-sensitive terms are fairly new, or are being applied in a different context. For example, it used to be fashionable to talk about “green” electronics? Now, the preferred term by many companies and universities is sustainable electronic design. This is not just a study in semantics. Many people use eco, green and sustainability as interchangeable terms that mean roughly the same thing. But do they?
Eco or green design refers to the development of products, buildings or services that are sensitive to environmental issues. The key goal in successful green designs is achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness in terms of energy and usage of materials. For chip and board designers, this translates directly into low power – both hardware and software – which in turn requires a systems designer perspective.
Sustainable electronic design refers to process that spans the entire life cycle of a product. In truth, design is a misnomer, since it suggests just one portion of the complete product life cycle. For this reason, I should replace “design” with “development.” But for the sake of continuity, I’ll stay with the more common vernacular of “design.”
The aim of sustainable design is to balance economic, social, and ecological sustainability. Traditionally, the multidiscipline engineering community has focused on the first and last aspects of this definition, namely economic and ecological effects on product design. In the past, economics has always ruled. Today, the same is true – economics rule, but with this difference. Ecological impacts have gained a more clear economic cost thanks to end-of-life disposal costs, public perceptions, etc., which means that sustainability must now be considered as an additional constraint on the solution option space for product design.
Consider the example of alternative energy technology. Energy creation and storage is perhaps the most important aspect of sustainability for chip and board designers. But renewable and alternative energy systems must meet economic realities. If a design can be accomplished using current generation and storage technology, then there is little reason for a designer to look for alternative solutions – e.g., solar, energy scavengers, etc. Little reason until one considers the entire product life cycle cost. This is where sustainability is changing the equation. More legislative laws are requiring manufacturers to pay for end-of-life disposal. These laws bring the end-of-life costs directly to the forefront of the design cycle. You might call this a Design-for-Sustainability (DFS) methodology.
Regardless of the names, adding the cost of eventual disposal increase the front-end costs of the product, which give may give alternative energy sources a boost if they can provide the required energy and future disposal costs in line with current technologies.
What does this mean to designers? They must add a new set of trade-off analysis at the architectural level of the design process that examines the use of alternative energy and end-of-live disposal costs in the design. For this to occur, engineers must have a great understanding of the impact of these affects.
Are you a designer wrestling with the additional constraints of sustainable and/or green design? Let us know which low power or system-level technical issues give you the most problems and will engage the community to find a solution.
作者：John Blyler，译者：与非网 张敏
;){kind=link}