Industry Expert Blogs

You can never have too much battery life in portable devices. That's a given, but what about the wired networks? They also use too much power, and let's face it, power is money. Because so much of the data we use travels through Ethernet-based networks, we have the IEEE 802.3az standard for Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE).

The concept behind EEE is simple: Go to low-power mode when not transmitting or receiving data. There's no need for the physical-layer (PHY) transmitters to be at full power when idle. Figure 1 shows the various PHY states specified in the 802.3az standard.