Technology's low powered future
Next month is the 50th anniversary of the invention of the microchip. Dan Simmons travels to Texas, the home of the chip, to look back at its past and forward to its future.
 Jack Kilby received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000 |
The insight that led Mr Kilby to this breakthrough was his realisation that if all the bits of an electric circuit were made from the same material then the whole thing could be printed on a single chip. It would be small and easy to mass produce.
Half a century on from that momentous insight and the ubiquity of the chip is well proven. But Texas Instruments, currently the world's third largest chip maker, wants to take it further and to do so it is busy trying to break another electronic frontier.
Miniature technology
 Devices with low power consumption allows greater functionality |
Click was shown one such example with a demonstration model of a projector housed inside the shell of a mobile phone.
Hundreds of thousands of microscopic mirrors inside the handset flip with tiny amounts of energy, reflecting the right colours to make up the picture.
Power parsimony makes this possible. If it needed as much power as a standard projector, the show would be over in minutes.
"In designing this pico-projector, with the use of LED illumination and the chip, along with other components, we've engineered it to last longer," said Michael Guillory, head of marketing for Texas Instruments' digital light processing products.
"You want to use the cell phone, so you don't want it to take up all its power using the projector," he said. "So by designing it to last at least an hour and a half it allows our customers to manufacture a very useable device."
TI hopes the first products using this miniature technology will go on sale in 2009.
Low power
It also demonstrated how grapes can be used to power a clock.
 Some chips can be powered by alternative sources of energy |
"We [Texas Instruments] have created systems that are so low-powered they can sample sensors and transmit information wireless without the need of a battery and they will last forever," he said.
 |  Wouldn't it be great to have a smoke alarm where you never change the batteries, and it wasn't plugged into the mains?  Texas Instruments' engineering manager David Freeman |
As an example of this TI wants to use vibrations generated when traffic passes over a bridge to power sensors so they can monitor themselves and relay the data back to inspectors.
Vibration power
The buzz phrase for this is "energy scavenging". This means not just using solar power, but capturing energy from any light source, any sound, any vibration, any heat.
An office, home or a car engine might produce three milliwatts of energy and that is now enough to run diagnostics, monitor and control other things.
"Wouldn't it be great to have a smoke alarm where you never change the batteries, and it wasn't plugged into the mains?" said David Freeman, engineering manager at TI.
"It would be wherever you wanted to put it and if you scavenge energy correctly that smoke alarm can actually talk to other alarms," he said. "So when one goes off and your bedroom door's closed, the one in your bedroom can also go off
"This just from the energy that can be scavenged from a normal household environment - from the light, vibrations, temperature and such," Mr Freeman added.
Perpetual devices
In a separate project Mr Freeman has adapted a mobile phone to run on solar power.
At the moment the panels would need to be six times larger than the one currently used in order to power the call on its own, but the benefits of low power chips are clear.
"There's this whole new regime of technology that nobody knows about because we've never been able to do the perpetual device," said Gene Frantz, TI principal fellow.
"The perpetual device is a device that needs no power to do its function. It just does it. And you have to step back a minute and think 'why would I want such a thing?' Or, better yet, 'what could I do differently?'"
If scavenging energy from the world around us is to work, then devices that we use will also have to work with a lot less energy.
Half a century after the first chip was born, these Texans not only think small is beautiful, but less is more.Source: BBC