Chipping away at power consumption
By Bill Scanlon
If the Internet would just stop expanding for a year or two, breakthroughs in chip technology would dramatically lower electricity consumption.
Alas, demand for more bits and bytes threatens to gobble up electricity and bandwidth faster than companies such as Broadcom, IBM, Intel, Motorola and PMC-Sierra can lower power consumption. But the chipmakers are trying.
By the end of 2001, Broadcom plans to deploy chips with wires just 0.18 micron thick that can power network devices and use just one-fourth the wattage of last year's chips. "That's a huge amount of power reduction by migrating to newer technologies," said Victor Hu, product line marketing manager for the high-speed networking group at Broadcom.
IBM last week said it will produce a high-performance chip with wires so thin that 800 bundled together will be as thick as a human hair. It uses IBM's silicon-on-insulator technology and consumes less power than more complex chips while providing equivalent performance. "As far as we look, we don't see a real physical limit" to shrinking semiconductor size, said Russ Lange, chief technologist at IBM's microelectronics division.
Chips or processors are the key to most Internet devices, from personal computers and servers to routers and the chassis that switch signals from optical to electronic and back to optical.
Broadcom and IBM are also putting into their chips the intelligence to detect whether the device is running at just partial capacity. If it detects an absence of activity, it powers itself down, saving electricity. When it detects that more power is needed, it ramps up. "That can save from 5 percent up to 90 percent if the chip is just idling - and that's all the way through the network," Hu said.
Last week, scientists at IBM and Nikon announced they are working on a chip that uses beams of electrons to etch circuits onto chips and that may perform the same functions as today's chips at one-thousandth the expenditure of electricity. Scientists at Applied Materials, ASM Lithography and Lucent Technologies are developing similar technology. Transmeta also developed a lower-power chip.
Intel, meanwhile, released a paper last week showing that its scientists can produce transistors with structures just 30 nanometers in size and three atomic layers thick. They will enable microprocessors that run on less than a volt of power, include 400 million transistors on a chip and run at 10 gigahertz. Possible applications: searching complex optical databases or translating conversations from one language to another.
