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New Chip Promises Longer Battery Life
Roland Piquepaille writes "It always happens when you need it the most: the battery of your cellphone just died. But now, researchers of the University of Rochester have developed a wireless chip that needs ten times less power than current designs. The new chip relies on a technology named injection locked frequency divider (ILFD) which dramatically reduces the time needed to check for transmission frequencies which are performed several billion times per second by your current phone. The new chip uses five transistors and can perform divisions by 3 instead of only 2 by previous circuits, allowing a perfect communication between two phones communicating at 2.0001 and 2.0002 gigahertz respectively."
Dude: Hui Wu invented this new chip that saves loads of power.
Bloke: Who?
Dude: Yes
Bloke: so who invented this chip.
Dude: Hui did.
Bloke: Thats what I'm asking you.
Dude: Yer I know, Hui did.
Bloke: Quit it and tell me who invented the chip.
Dude: Im not joking, Hui did.
liqbase
You have brain cancer. Check into a hospital immediately.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Imagine all the power the old chip doesn't use. Multiply this number by ten. This is the amount of power the new chip doesn't use. So you end up not using ten times as much power as you used to not use.
Bender: "Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two!"
Fry: "It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as two."
E pluribus unum
Actually, I'm still a little confused. Could you try an analogy using cars instead? Thanks.
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
To explain in a slightly different way, we'll use the analogy of trying to accurately count a mountain of cars. The easiest way to do so, is to weigh the whole pile, and then divde by the average weight of a single car, and you get the total number of cars. The question is how you get the "average weight" of a single car. If you weigh just one car, and use that as the average, then you have some total inaccuracy X. If you instead weigh 10 cars and divde the weight by 10, the inaccuracy is much less: roughly X/10. This is how the old method of PLL circuit design worked. The greater the frequency, the more cars you used to find the average weight, and so the greater the accuracy you could get in finding out the total number of cars in the whole pile, or the exact frequency. The new method described in the Article is roughly analagous to modifying all of your cars to ensure that the variation in the weights of the cars is much lower, so you can rely on just one car to provide you with the precision needed to determine the total number in the pile.
My 0.02 cents
What the hell does "ten times less" mean? If it uses 1 watt now, does that mean it now uses 1 - (10 * 1) = -9 watts? So using htis actually generates energy?
Every once in awhile, someone comes along with a post that restores your faith in /.
1: "Hoo" invented this new chip ... Um ... I have to go ... over ... there now ...
2: No "Hway"!
1: YES way!
2: That's what I said
1: What?
2: The name of the guy is pronounced "Hway", not "Hoo"
1: Oh. I thought it was "Hoo"
2: No it's "Hway"
1: I see
2: Yes. Well
1: Ok