A
SINGAPORE-American brain trust has made a new microchip they claim
is seven times more powerful than its existing cousin.
The
icing on this cake: This new chip consumes 30 times less
power.
Mobile phones that could need re-charging just once every two
weeks and surgically-implanted devices lasting several lifetimes
could be a reality a few years down the road, once this 2mm-by-2mm
chip finds its way into the heart of electronic devices.
The chip, unveiled at the International Solid-State Circuit
conference in San Francisco yesterday, can make such a leap over
current chip technology because of its design, said Associate
Professor Yeo Kiat Seng, who heads the School of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering's circuits and systems division at the
Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
Traditionally, to get better performance out of a microchip,
more power is required.
The additional power is used to drown out the interference
generated by the chip. This interference is known in engineering
parlance as 'noise'.
Over time, it has become harder and harder to make microchips
any more powerful than they already were, especially since smaller
chips - which are in demand for portable devices like mobile phones
- generate more noise than larger ones.
Instead of passing more power through the chip to boost its
performance, Prof Yeo and his co-researchers harnessed the
interference generated to do this.
This out-of-the-box concept for the microchip, which was
invented back in 1947, came in 2005 from Rice University computer
scientist Professor Krisna Palem, who is also the director of NTU's
Institute of Sustainable Nanoelectronics.
Since then, 'thousands of man hours' have been burned to develop
the idea, said Prof Yeo.
When the first batch of microchips was delivered last December,
it had to be put through repeated test runs because no one on the
NTU or Rice teams could believe it worked so well.
Intel Microprocessor Technology Lab director Shekhar Borkar
called the 'energy and speed advantages' of the new technology a
'significant achievement'.
Prof Yeo reckons it will take about four years for actual
products to appear, since chip-makers will need time to design
chips tailored to specific products.