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Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have unveiled a new chip design for portable electronics that can be up to 10 times more energy-efficient than present technology. The design could lead to a variety of devices that will last far longer when running from a battery.

The innovative design was presented Feb. 5 at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco by Joyce Kwong, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Kwong carried out the project with a number of her MIT and TI colleagues. The team demonstrated the ultra-lowpower design techniques on TI's MSP430, a widely used microcontroller.

The key to the improvement in energy efficiency was to find ways of making the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual. While most current chips operate at approximately one volt, the new design works at just 0.3 volts. Reducing the operating voltage, however, is not as simple as it might sound because existing microchips have been optimized for many years to operate at higher standard voltages. Therefore, memory and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate at very low power-supply voltages.
One key to the new design, was to build a high-efficiency, DC-to-DC converter that reduces the voltage to the lower level — right on the same chip, thereby reducing the number of separate components. The redesigned memory and logic, along with the DC-to-DC converter, are integrated to realize a complete system-on-a-chip solution.

One of the biggest problems the team had to overcome was the variability that occurs in typical chip manufacturing. Because at lower voltage levels, variations and imperfections in the silicon chip become more problematic. Designing the chip to minimize its vulnerability to such variations was a huge part of the task.

So far the new chip is a proof of concept. Commercial applications could become available in five years, maybe even sooner.

The work was conducted at the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories and was funded, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.