Hot Chips

Suck it Pacific Tech, the crew at M.I.T. have a new chip uses so little power, it could enable sensors, communication devices and other gadgets that run on body heat and movement alone.

Nearly as impressive are the names of the principle researchers: Anantha Chandrasakan, Joyce Kwong, Noveen Verma and Yogesh Ramadass (my personal favorite).

The chip uses 70 percent less voltage than current chip technologies and could lead to an order-of-magnitude increase in energy efficiency for electronics in the next five years. Better circuit design and batteries have already led to smaller, more-mobile electronics, but changing a battery is not an option for many medical and military devices. The military researchers and war specialists at DARPA helped to fund the M.I.T. work, and are keen to increase the lifespan of their technologies - and potentially even eliminate the need to charge them. Military strategists imagine these types of low-power chips could be used in the battlefield, particularly in body and environmental sensors. But for those who are not killing in the name of corporate oil revenue, use in cellphones and computers are being investigated by Nokia and Intel.

Designing a low-voltage chip is complicated, because transistors -- the bases of chips -- use voltage changes to switch on and off. Increase the voltage to the system, and the transistor eventually hits its threshold and switches on. Decrease it, and the transistor switches off. That ability is what allows it to store the binary information -- the 1's and 0's -- that forms the basis of computing. But at low voltages, variations introduced during transistor production can cause errors. "When you scale voltages, the first thing to break is memory on a chip," Chandrakasan said. "You have to redesign the memory and logic so you can handle the variation." The power requirements for sensors attached to the body could be reduced to near zero, he said. The body's heat and movement could generate the microwattage necessary to power the devices.

If you're a nerd, this is fascinating. If you're a regular person, it means gadgets are going to get smaller, need less power from bulky sources, and basically make things more like those science fiction predictions of the past. It's no railgun, but it's still cool.