[opendtv] TI, MIT team to design ultra-low voltage chip

  • From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2008 11:32:36 -0500

TI, MIT team to design ultra-low voltage chip

R. Colin Johnson
(02/05/2008 10:01 AM EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206104308

PORTLAND, Ore. - Texas Instruments claims its 16-bit microcontroller is
the world's lowest-power device, but a new version implementing an
experimental design technique conceived at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology promises another 10-fold cut in power consumption.

The new low-power chip design will be described Tuesdsay (Feb. 5) by TI
and MIT engineers 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.

The design technique works by powering parts of the chip at just 0.3
volts, or as much as 10 times less power than normal. This was
accomplished by designing on-chip, high-efficiency DC-to-DC conversions
to operate circuitry that normally hogs current. The system-on-a-chip
solution required redesigning select memory and logic circuits to
operate at the lower voltage.

Another key to the design was overcoming processing variations on chips,
since even the slightest variations 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, team
leader and a professor of electrical engineering at MIT.

TI and MIT engineers will demonstrate the new design technique using
TI's MSP430 microcontroller, but claim it can also be used to redesign
key circuitry in a wide variety of chips. These include devices ranging
from cellphones to medical implants to wireless sensor networks.
Portable devices based on the technique could increase battery life by a
factor of 10, according to the developers, and some could even run off
of energy harvested from the environment.

The design technique could show up "in five years, maybe even sooner,"
said Chandrakasan.

Medical implants are an especially attractive application, according to
Chandrakasan, because the ultra-low voltages could be harvested from the
"ambient energy" in a patient's body, thereby powering medical implants
indefinitely without batteries.

Portable devices could also be based on the new design technique,
according to Chandrakasan, as well as military applications such as
ultra-small wireless sensor networks that could draw power from the
environment after deployment on the battlefield.

Research funding for the project was provided by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency and Texas Instruments.

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