As electronic devices get more powerful and more portable, makers and users are running up against a problem.
"Give me a little more battery life," said Brian Matas, vice president of research at IC Insights Inc, a semiconductor industry research firm in Scottsdale, Arizona. "That's the cry people are making the most these days."
With that in mind, IBM Corp is to announce Monday a technology it says can cut the power consumption of semiconductor logic chips by as much as 40 percent while increasing performance by up to 20 percent.
For the first time, the company claims, it has figured out how to channel power to selected circuits on a semiconductor without fully powering all of them.
Today, many semiconductors contain millions of circuits; providing power to all of them, all the time, is akin to leaving all the lights on in your house whether you're using them or not.
Even though circuits are a fraction of the size of a human hair, they can drain a battery quickly and produce lots of heat. Most computers today need built-in fans that cool processors and other semiconductors to keep them from overheating and damaging a device.
IBM has applied the new technology, which it calls "voltage islands," only to logic chips, not the larger and more complex processing chips that are a computer's brains.
Still, the breakthrough means that IBM has beaten its competitors to a goal that has been something of a Holy Grail for semiconductor makers. Cell phone chip maker Texas Instruments Inc, processor company Applied Materials Inc and industry giant Intel Corp have all spent millions researching ways to cut the amount of juice their chips use.
The chip won't be marketed until later this year, and IBM hasn't announced a price.
IBM senior engineer Tom Bednar, a chip architect in the company's Burlington, Vermont. microelectronics lab, has been working on the "voltage islands" concept for more than a year.
His project was created after IBM's chip customers -- companies such as cell phone maker Nokia, game console maker Nintendo and computer router and server maker Cisco Systems Inc -- asked for semiconductors that use less power and generate less heat.
"It almost sounds like a little thing," Bednar said, "but power is probably becoming the biggest issue as we get to these levels of technology where we can integrate so many circuits in such a small space," Bednar said.
By powering up only certain areas of a chip, Bednar said, electronics manufacturers can pack even more circuits on to chips, use more of them in their devices and worry less about damage.
This opens the door to more powerful and reliable electronics devices for consumers.
IBM recently designed a chip for Cisco that contains more than 35 million "gates," or logic circuits. IBM claims it is the most complex custom-made semiconductor ever built.
That chip was developed as IBM was working out the "voltage island" technology. Eventually, the company believes, that technology will allow chip designers to pack as many as 72 million circuits onto a single chip.
"Having just bits and pieces of a chip having power supplied to it is a very unique technology that opens up all sorts of opportunities," said Matas of IC Insights. "It sounds like it has a lot of good potential."
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