Long lived self-sufficient electrical and electronic devices are being created thanks to three things - energy harvesting, more efficient interfacing electronics and lower power device electronics more tolerant of the energy harvesting inputs. Here we look at ultra low power electronics.
At the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco which was held from February 8th to 12th 2009, Intel retained the record for device count in a single microprocessor. At the Conference Intel unveiled the 2.3bn-transistor 45 nm Xeon enterprise chip (set to ship later in 2009).
Three Intel fellows - Mark Bohr, Stefan Rusu and Rajesh Kumar - described the features of the chip such as an integrated microcontroller that not only monitors chip performance and sets a "unified power management state" but can also be upgraded through firmware. The chip can completely remove idle power using core-level power-gate transistors that shut down inactive cores. A 'turbo' mode allows the chip to transfer voltage from inactive cores to one or two that might be running software and increase their performance level towards the chip's maximum. Intel's Xeon processors are built on architecture code-named Nehalem architecure.
In their quest for low-power performance, Intel found that it could reach back into a technique developed for the Pentium 4 processor, simultaneous multi-threading, which exploits parallelism in software. Intel had this technology nine years ago, but software could rarely benefit from it; today, parallelism is mainstream.
Intel's is expanding into new and emerging markets, most notably the extremely power-sensitive spaces for mobile Internet devices and stripped-down laptops. In an ISSCC keynote, Mark Bohr also pushed for Intel's technology to be seen alongside the complex systems-on-chip that now dominate other silicon markets, arguing that his company's chips exhibit at least the same degree of integration.
Source: The IET
IDTechEx notes that other chip manufacturers are hard at work developing ultra low power chips. Some are dedicated to purpose. For example, Philips, one of the largest electronics companies in Europe, will make the first announcement of its Ultra Low Power Radio at the forthcoming IDTechEx conference and exhibition "Energy Harvesting and Storage Europe".
Top Image: Intel's Xeon processors built on the Nehalem architecture. (Source: The IET)
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