Feb. 5, 2008 - Researchers at Texas Instruments and the Massachussets Institute of Technology have unveiled a new chip design for portable electronics that can be up to ten times more energy-efficient than current technology. The design could lead to cell phones, implantable medical devices, and sensors that last far longer when running from a battery, the researchers say.

The main challenge for improving energy efficiency was to find ways of making the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual, explains MIT researcher Anantha Chandrakasan. The key to the new design, he says, was to build a DC-to-DC converter - which reduces the voltage to the lower level - onto the same chip, which is more efficient than having the converter as a separate component.

Commercial applications could become available "in five years in a number of exciting areas," Chandrakasan says. For example, portable and implantable medical devices, portable communications devices and networking devices could be based on such chips, and thus have greatly increased operating times. There may also be a variety of military applications in the production of tiny, self-contained sensor networks that could be dispersed in a battlefield.

The new chip design is being presented today at the International Solid- State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.