Joyce Kwong led the project with MIT colleagues Anantha Chandrakasan, Yogesh Ramadass and Naveen Verma. Contributors to the Texas Instruments were Markus Koesler, Korbinian Huber and Hans Moormann.
The key to improving energy efficiency was to find ways to make the circuits on the chip works with a voltage level much lower than usual. While most current chips operate at around one volt, The new design operates on only 0.3 volts.
However, reducing the operating voltage is not as simple as it seems, because existing microchips have been developed over many years to operate at higher standard voltage. Memories and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate with power supplies that are of low voltages.
One of the biggest problems the team had to overcome was the variability that occurs in typical chip manufacturing. By using lower voltage levels, variations and imperfections in the silicon chip become more problematic. Designing chips to minimize their vulnerability to such variations was an important part of the strategy.
So far, the new chip is only a proof of concept. Commercial applications could be available within five years, and perhaps earlier, in many areas. For example, portable or implantable medical devices, mobile phones, and devices connected to computer networks may be based on such chips, thus increasing significantly its operating times without recharging. You can also have a wide variety of applications for military use in the production of autonomous networks of tiny sensors that could be dispersed in a battlefield.
In some applications, such as medical devices to be implanted in patients, the goal is to make the power requirements so low that such devices can be energized by the "environmental energy" (using the body's own heat or movement to provide the necessary energy.)
The key to improving energy efficiency was to find ways to make the circuits on the chip works with a voltage level much lower than usual. While most current chips operate at around one volt, The new design operates on only 0.3 volts.
However, reducing the operating voltage is not as simple as it seems, because existing microchips have been developed over many years to operate at higher standard voltage. Memories and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate with power supplies that are of low voltages.
One of the biggest problems the team had to overcome was the variability that occurs in typical chip manufacturing. By using lower voltage levels, variations and imperfections in the silicon chip become more problematic. Designing chips to minimize their vulnerability to such variations was an important part of the strategy.
So far, the new chip is only a proof of concept. Commercial applications could be available within five years, and perhaps earlier, in many areas. For example, portable or implantable medical devices, mobile phones, and devices connected to computer networks may be based on such chips, thus increasing significantly its operating times without recharging. You can also have a wide variety of applications for military use in the production of autonomous networks of tiny sensors that could be dispersed in a battlefield.
In some applications, such as medical devices to be implanted in patients, the goal is to make the power requirements so low that such devices can be energized by the "environmental energy" (using the body's own heat or movement to provide the necessary energy.)
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