Energy harvesting cpus the focus of $1.75million research project

The initiative, which involves scientists from Virginia Commonwealth University and the Universities of Michigan and California, aims to realise a high tech, low energy computing device that could one day be used by millions. "The purpose of this work is to establish a new paradigm for digital computing which will be extremely energy efficient and hopefully allow us to pack more and more computing devices on a chip without having to worry about excessive heat generation," said Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia. "This will allow us to increase the computational prowess of computers beyond what is available today." Prof Bandyopadhyay and his team are also hoping to build processors that can produce their own energy through the ambient environment. He believes that if the transistors currently used in chips are replaced with tiny nanomagnets that can also process digital information, heat dissipation could be reduced by one thousand to ten thousand times. "This allows packing more devices in a chip and increasing the computational power of the chip several times," he noted. "This type of digital computing system could be ideal for medical devices such as processors implanted in an epileptic patient's brain that monitor brain signals to warn of impending seizures. This processor would run by harvesting energy only from the patient's head movements, without requiring a battery."