Chip Power Breakthrough Reported by Startup

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that a tiny Silicon Valley firm, Multigig, is proposing a novel way to synchronize the operations of computer chips, addressing power-consumption problems facing the semiconductor industry. From the article: 'John Wood, a British engineer who founded Multigig in 2000, devised an approach that involves sending electrical signals around square loop structures, said Haris Basit, Multigig's chief operating officer. The regular rotation works like the tick of a conventional clock, while most of the electrical power is recycled, he said. The technology can achieve 75% power savings over conventional clocking approaches, the company says.'"

Comments

No overclocking

[rcw-work]

You can't readily adjust the amount of time it takes electricity to make its way around a fixed-size loop. If this is what is actually clocking the chip, it'll have an official frequency (or two, perhaps, for low-power usage) and you'll be stuck with that. The manufacturer would have to throw out, rather than derate, any parts that don't work at that frequency.

Chip technology is awesome

[EntropyXP]

Ok nerds, tell me if this is feasible....

First of all, I can barely grasp how chips work in the first place, lots of yes-no-maybe so gates that the electrons have to pass through.

So, would it be possible to make a 3-D chip? Where, instead of one line or branches that the electron follows but a crazy ass network for it to flow through?

Lower power means lower heat, too.

[khasim]

So "up to" 75% savings on "up to" 50% of the electricity usage. So 3/8 or 37.5% savings, all in all...

If it saves that much electricity on the CPU, that should also yield a heat reduction.

Now, whether it is linear or not, any heat reduction is a Good Thing (tm).

Hopefully we can choose between faster chips at the heat levels we have now, or the same speed chips at a 37.5% reduction in heat (and points in between).

Re:nah

[iamlucky13]

I share your doubts, but must point out that current hybrid cars already use regenerative braking. The efficiency is only something like 30% (losses to transmit through the CVT, generate, store, spin the motor again), but it's still a little bit of return. Since the motor is already designed to act as a generator, it should be little extra investment to program the transmission to load the motor before mechanically engaging the brakes.

Only for the CPU

[vlad_petric]

In your average laptop, the power consumed by a CPU when running something (i.e. not just idling around) is about half the total power. The other half, roughly, is consumed by the screen.

EETimes: Xmas gift leads to rotary wave epiphany

[retiarius]

In addition to the already cited

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml;jsessionid=SG3NCFVRB3QWEQSNDBESKHA?articleID=18 7200783

the EE Times piece (in the printed edition not up on the web) has a sidebar,
with neat background on the inventor:
________

Christmas present leads to ratoary wave epiphany

          The Rotary Traveling Wave technology was the brainchild of MultiGig Inc.
founder and chief technology officer John Wood, a self-taught inventor
and son of an inventor who developed a method for self-aligning installed
underground water pipes. In a company filled with PhDs, Wood is the only
employee without a college degree.

          Wood earned millions from a patent on this technique for flash-welding
plastic materials. His passion for technology drives him to order textbooks
by the dozen when pursuing a new subject, sometimes noting their errors in
scribbled notes in the margins, said MultiGig COO Haris Basit. "I've worked at
research labs including Yorktown Heights and Bell Labs, and John is clearly
a cut above," Basit said.

          In the late 1990s, Wood was researching high-speed serial I/O using
traditional ring and crystal oscillators. "As I started to explore alternatives,
the first thing I looked at was transmission times," he said.

          An intitial prototype, using coaxial cables, was "not very exciting."
Then Christmas 1998 brought an ephiphany. "My son had just gotten a
car racing game with a crossover on a single track. That gave me the idea
for arranging the transmission line that way," said Wood.

          After a few more months of work, Wood decided to use arrays of loops
to create an approach that could work independently of any frequency
or process technology.

          "It took a year or two until we could find direct commercial applications.
Before that, I was just working on it as hobby." said Wood. "But the more we
looked at clock distribution, the more we realized this could be useful."

-- Rick Merritt

Re:I'll call bullshit

[rufty_tufty]

Clock skew impacts your timing margin (If you've got 2 flip flops that in theory see the clock at the same instant, any uncertainty in the clock arriving will inpact your timing from one to the other). One concequence of this is you often have to have larger faster drivers on both your clock tree and your logic to work around this timing problem.
Larger drivers = larger power.

Therefore if you've got a method to make your clocks arrive more accuratly then you've more timing margin between FFs and therfore can use smaller drivers.

Clock trees are also the major consumer of power in most designs, so anything that can reduce them is good.

Async removes the clock altogether so you save power there.

So yes both of them can be right.