Boffins come up with low energy chip

BOFFINS AT MIT and Texas Instruments have emerged from their smoke-filled labs claiming to have invented a chip that is 10 times more energy efficient.

The power consumption of the chip is so low that they think that devices that use them could be recharged by body heat.

Top boffin Anantha Chandrakasan said that the trick was finding ways to make the circuits on the chip work at a low voltage.

Current chips operate at around 1.0 volt, but the new design works at 0.3 volts. Next the boffins built a high-efficiency DC-to-DC converter. This reduces the voltage to the lower level on the same chip. This means cutting down the separate components, redesigning the memory and logic and integrating the lot.

Chandrakasan said the chip could be in the shops in five years in portable and implantable medical devices, portable communications devices, and networking devices. µ

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