PORTLAND, OR — Industry sources report that Texas Instruments and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are colaborating on an experimental design ultra-low voltage IC that promises a 10-fold decrease in power consumption.

The new low power chip will be discussed at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. "These design techniques show great potential for future low-power integrated circuits," said Dennis Buss, chief scientist at Texas Instruments.

Parts of the chip are powered at just 0.3 volts. This was accomplished by designing on-chip, high-efficiency DC-to-DC conversions to operate circuitry that normally draws higher current. The chip also required redesigning select memory and logic circuits to operate at the lower voltage to minimize processing variations on chips, which are exaggerated by the ultra-low power operating voltage.

"A big part of our strategy was designing the chip to minimize its vulnerability to such variations," said Anantha Chandrakasan, professor of electrical engineering at MIT

TI and MIT engineers claim the new technology can be used to redesign key circuitry in a wide variety of devices ranging from cellphones to medical implants to wireless sensor networks. According to the developers, portable devices using the technology could see battery life increased by a factor of 10, and some could even run off of energy directly from the environment.

According to Chandrakasan, medical implants are an especially attractive application, because the ultra-low voltages could use "ambient energy" in a patient's body, powering medical implants indefinitely without batteries.
 
The design technique could show up "in five years, maybe even sooner," said Chandrakasan.
 

• Prev
• Next