A University of California, San Diego technology that significantly reduces the amount of energy wasted by chips in computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices has recently passed the trillion watt-hour milestone in energy savings, according to the technology’s current licensee, Tela Innovations. With residential energy costs at just over 11 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the savings are significant and growing, so far totaling well over $100 million that consumers haven’t been charged on their electricity bills.
Electronics are constantly leaking power, and that energy is wasted without having contributed anything to performance. This is especially true of devices that consumers tend to leave turned on even when they aren’t being used, such as personal computers, cell phones, and cable and Internet connections.
The technology, co-invented in 2003 by UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Professor Andrew B. Kahng and his then-student Puneet Gupta, subtly modifies the dimensions of transistors, the tiny switches that control the flow of electricity in an integrated circuit. This approach, known as “gate-length biasing,” exploits the fact that slower transistors leak less power. The invention essentially ensures that transistors on a chip are as slow as possible without affecting performance.
The technology is now widely used in numerous applications such as network processors, Internet routers and the graphics processing units (GPUs) that are found in personal computers, tablets and game consoles.
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