Tech: MIT develops chip drawing one-tenth as much power

[dracodraconis]

MIT researchers have developed a microchip based on standard fabrication methods that uses as little as 10% of the power of current microchips. They used a scalable voltage approach to deal with the issue of switching errors (where the divide between a 1 and a 0 becomes lost in low-voltage noise), resulting in increasing the number of transistors used each memory cell from 6 to 8. As expected, the cost of reducing voltage and reducing processing speed, but the chip is expected to find use in various medical and military devices that could benefit from ultra-low voltage operation.