Tag: Chip

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New Chip Uses 10 Times Less Power

newchip

A partnership between Texas Instruments Latest News about Texas Instruments and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Latest News about Massachusetts Institute of Technology has produced a proof-of-concept microchip architecture that is 10 times more efficient than current technologies.

The design — which was presented on Tuesday at the International Solid State Circuits Conference — uses a redesigned memory and logic architecture to allow the chip to operate at a much lower voltage level, which allows devices such as cell phones to operate with a longer battery life.

While consumers likely won’t see any new devices for at least five years, researchers say the chip could help build long-lasting cell phones and implantable medical devices that use body heat to power its systems. The research, funded in part by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could also lead to the development of military sensor networks that are scattered across the battlefield.

“These design techniques show great potential for TI future low-power IC (integrated circuit) products and applications including wireless terminals, RFID, battery-operated instrumentation, sensor networks, medical electronics and many others,” said Dennis Buss, chief scientist at Texas Instruments.

How the Chip Was Done

The chip’s development required the researchers to re-imagine how the circuits on the microchip were powered.

That was no simple task considering that microchip architecture was designed to work at one volt, while the new chip is powered at 0.3 volts. To accomplish that, the designers built a DC-to-DC converter directly on the chip, then integrated the memory and logic systems with the converter.

The end result will be a more efficiently powered microchip, which — if the design can be cheaply manufactured — leapfrogs several generations of innovation, said Gideon Intrater, vice president of solutions architecture for Mountain View, Calif.-based MIPS Technologies, a semiconductor design firm.

“In the past, with each transition from one process generation to the next, power consumption was reduced by a factor of about three times,” Intrater told TechNewsWorld. “These process transitions occurred roughly every two to three years.”

Coming Soon

The new microchip is still in the design phase, so it’s difficult to predict the types of devices that might hit the market in the near future; however, the chip would have the capability of extending the current battery life of devices already on the market.

The increased power, though, would also likely lead to smaller — and more powerful — devices that could run longer and more efficiently between charges.

“It is clear that any battery-operated device could benefit from the longer battery life and smaller battery size,” Intrater said. “These products could include traditional mobile consumer devices like cell phones, PDAs and media players, as well as medical devices.

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Lab on a single Chip Medical Breakthrough

Medi-chip

It’s common knowledge that to carry out genetic tests, one would need expensive, state-of-the-art laboratory. But that might soon change thanks to a group of Canadian scientists who’ve developed a “lab-on-a-chip” device to conduct these tests. What is interesting about the device is that it’s supposed to be portable, inexpensive, and efficient.

Hailing from the University of Alberta; Professor Christopher Backhouse and Professor Linda Pilarski (Department of Oncology), along with research student, Govind Kaigala, have developed a $1,000 device the size of a shoebox that can conduct genetic tests and deliver results in less than half an hour.

Elaborating on the innovation, the researchers said that miniaturization is the key factor that has drastically brought down the cost of this gadget.

The Canadian Press quoted Professor Backhouse as saying that like computers, which in their early days, were inaccessible; somewhat like million-dollar beasts who formed a roomful, yet one needed a Ph.D. to to be able to operate one of them.

Similarly, the Professor said Life Science technologies do exist but aren’t being utilized optimally because they’re very expensive. Hence, the key to this mini-laboratory was to integrate, shrink, and automate. The ability of the device to implement a very wide range of tests on a standard platform quickly and inexpensively would make it indispensable for the future.

The research team believes that their miniature lab-on-a-chip will provide Cancer patients with quick genetic tests, in turn speeding up treatment processes. The team also believes the device may be useful in finding genetic signatures for particular viruses or bacteria or for testing the quality of water, and so on.

source:techtree 

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Intel MacBook Air Chip on Offer

Intel-mac

Seems Apple’s recent launch of its ultra-thin “MacBook Air” has gotten other PC makers into a tizzy. They’ve obviously set themselves an agenda of coming up with a design as innovative if not more than the MacBook Air.

Especially so after Intel announced that its special Core 2 Duo chip — so far used only in the MacBook Air — will now be offered to the rest of the PC industry if interested. The company said that most of the technology used in this chip would become part of mainstream offerings after introduction of the Montevina platform later this year.

It’s now learnt that PC makers the likes of Lenovo and Fujitsu are already in the process of developing systems based on Intel’s special chip. While these laptops are expected to be available shortly, there’s no word on the specifications yet.

Meanwhile, in case of Lenovo’s existing ThinkPad notebooks and Fujitsu’s LifeBook notebooks, these typically deploy ultra-low voltage versions of Intel Core 2 Duo chips so as to fit into the tight spaces afforded by their ultra-portable designs. Intel’s special Core 2 Duo processor is expected to work around this problem and reduce the load on processing power.

Intel’s chip — that was designed on request by Apple while they were putting together a blueprint for their MacBook Air — fits into a package considerably smaller than the packages typically used by Intel in its notebook chips.

The chip is meant especially for notebooks of the ultra-portable (weighing less than 3 Pounds) variety, and consumes less power than Intel’s standard Core 2 Duo processor.

source:techtree