Coverage of low-power electronics in digital design textbooks: A systematic review

Power consumption in digital circuits has been a research topic since the 1990s, and has been of significant importance in industry since at least 2000. This contribution investigates power consumption in engineering education by means of a systematic review; to determine the extent to which recent introductory textbooks on digital design address this topic. English and German textbooks that have been published since 2011 are selected, and their tables of contents are examined for the presence of sections or subsections on the topic of power consumption. A total of twenty-four textbooks match the inclusion criteria of our systematic review and, of these books, about 40% cover power dissipation in digital circuits. Thus, a significant number of authors regard power consumption as an important topic even for an introductory text. However, most authors devote only one or two pages to the topic of power dissipation, and 60% of the authors do not have a subsection on it. Therefore, a more thorough coverage of low-power design and implementation choices is often designated as supplementary material or more specialized textbooks are recommended.