back to article Low-power transistors hint at alternative to battery bonfires

Since 1965, transistors have followed a path predicted by Gordon Moore, becoming more densely packed year after year. The result has been a steady improvement in CPU performance. Batteries, however, haven't advanced at the same pace. As Fred Schlachter, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, put it in a 2013 …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Micrologic

    Better transistors are great and all, but isn't the big drain for a device the brightly lit screen, followed by the transmitter? Okay, you could implant/inject/ingest these new circuits and run them off the voltage developed across your spleen, but then what do you do with the information? Straight to the brain, maybe? Hrmm...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Micrologic

      When you hear talk about devices able to harvest energy from the environment, that's a HUGE clue that it is talking about IoT. They don't have screens, and will just send/receive info via wifi/LTE (and probably harvest their power from those same wireless frequencies)

    2. swschrad

      how's the bias load?

      unless you are using transistors solely as digital switches, you have to bias them into a linear region of operation. that can take more power than an analog amplification. periodically I see bias applied across a digital switching transistor, probably for a speed profile. so, in a complex array of these new-based units, are they consistent in performance, and what's the bias or transient draw per X number?

    3. adam 40 Silver badge

      No it's the standby current

      The biggest consumer of electrons in a phone - on average - is the standby current.

      - How often does it wake up from deep sleep?

      - How long does it stay awake?

      - How much juice does the _receiver_ take while it's awake?

      - Any other tasks/processes that get triggered (e.g. email, sms etc?)

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How do they compare

    to current (pardon the pun) transistors? Do they use 1/10th, 1/100th or whatever, less power? The article mentions the new wattage and voltage, but no numbers for modern chips.

  3. Tom 64
    Thumb Up

    Interesting posibilities

    If we can literally print self powered computers almost anywhere, the computing resources available to humanity will jump exponentially. All those big supercomputers will quickly become redundant.

    It wont even matter if these transistors are 10x slower than current silicon if we can print 100x as many for half the price. Awesome research.

    1. Measurer

      Re: Interesting posibilities

      Only for problems that can be solved using parallel processing techniques, and then the softies still have to learn to code in parallel (good luck with that)!

  4. Pen-y-gors

    No, we still need really meaty batteries...

    Sod reducing power consumption, if we're going to get the one major feature still missing from smartphones i.e. a megawatt laser (or 'phaser') then we need some seriously good battery technology. Okay, a built-in tazer would be a start, and would use a bit less power, but we should be aiming for phone batteries rated in thousands of mega Amp/hours not milli A/h.

    Come on boffins, let's see some real innovation.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No, we still need really meaty batteries...

      I'll have the thousands of mega-amp hours battery for my house and charge it overnight please - I suspect that may not be pocket sized??

      that would also free up a lot of space in datacenters too, roughly garage full of serially linked "car batteries" is ripe for a bit of downsizing and lead/acid recovery.

      1. Yesnomaybe

        Re: No, we still need really meaty batteries...

        I want my Niling D-Sink NOW!

  5. luis river

    Photonic Tech

    The next step on Tech for lower power I.C. is the photonic tech applied to silicon microcircuits, this tech is already mature and soon reach market (2018 year)

  6. jms222

    Software

    Fix the current round of awful software (looking at you, Android) and you can sort out most power problems.

  7. captain veg Silver badge

    Envision?

    Did the author perhaps mean envisage?

    -A.

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