Energy Efficient Microchip

Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have unveiled a new chip design for portable electronics that can be up to 10 times more energy-efficient than present technology. The design could lead to a variety of devices that will last far longer when running from a battery.

The key to the improvement in energy efficiency was to find ways of making the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual. While most current chips operate at approximately one volt, the new design works at just 0.3 volts. Reducing the operating voltage, however, is not as simple as it might sound because existing microchips have been optimized for many years to operate at higher standard voltages. Therefore, memory and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate at very low power-supply voltages.

One key to the new design, was to build a high-efficiency, DC-to-DC converter that reduces the voltage to the lower level — right on the same chip, thereby reducing the number of separate components. The redesigned memory and logic, along with the DC-to-DC converter, are integrated to realize a complete system-on-a-chip solution.