Note: I posted this earlier as a reply, but no one seems to have noticed it. Hence this repost. I'm a long-time-reader-very-rare-poster, so sorry if this is not the right way to go about it.
Although the study quoted by the OP got a lot of media attention because of MIT involvement, what is more interesting is this actual product that has been released last month: "One AAA battery! The boss must be kidding..."
This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have managed to do this on an actual product that you can buy now (not just a research project!). They claim to be able to run for years (even >15 years) on typical low-power applications such as data loggers that wake up for a short while take a measurement and go to sleep. This is also the first microchip that can run on one battery... if you think that adding an external DC-DC converter would do the same trick, you have to remember that the external DC-DC converter needs to be ON even during sleep mode so the micro can wake up again, which burns quite a bit of power. They claim to have eliminated this by putting the DC-DC converter on chip.
Although the study quoted by the OP got a lot of media attention because of MIT involvement, what is more interesting is this actual product that has been released last month:
"One AAA battery! The boss must be kidding..."
This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have managed to do this on an actual product that you can buy now (not just a research project!). They claim to be able to run for years (even >15 years) on typical low-power applications such as data loggers that wake up for a short while take a measurement and go to sleep. This is also the first microchip that can run on one battery... if you think that adding an external DC-DC converter would do the same trick, you have to remember that the external DC-DC converter needs to be ON even during sleep mode so the micro can wake up again, which burns quite a bit of power. More articles on this product:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801775http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/26/43201/silicon-labs-microcontroller-features-integrated-dc-dc-for-portable-uses.htm
Robocopy is the command line utility from the Win XP resource kit cd, right? That might be good for pros, but I recently found this little utility (free for personal use) called TeraCopy via Lifehacker. Once installed, this becomes the default copy handler for Windows explorer and does an amazing job. It lets you pause and resume copying, and has error recovery too. It even is smart enough to recognize if I've started a copy operation and then try to copy more files by adding the new files to the previous copy job! I have been astonished by the speed of copying large number of files between disks after I started using this. If this small company can make this efficient utility that integrates so well into Windows, I say shame on M$.
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Note: I posted this earlier as a reply, but no one seems to have noticed it. Hence this repost. I'm a long-time-reader-very-rare-poster, so sorry if this is not the right way to go about it.
Although the study quoted by the OP got a lot of media attention because of MIT involvement, what is more interesting is this actual product that has been released last month: "One AAA battery! The boss must be kidding..."
This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have managed to do this on an actual product that you can buy now (not just a research project!). They claim to be able to run for years (even >15 years) on typical low-power applications such as data loggers that wake up for a short while take a measurement and go to sleep. This is also the first microchip that can run on one battery... if you think that adding an external DC-DC converter would do the same trick, you have to remember that the external DC-DC converter needs to be ON even during sleep mode so the micro can wake up again, which burns quite a bit of power. They claim to have eliminated this by putting the DC-DC converter on chip.
More articles on this micro: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801775 http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/26/43201/silicon-labs-microcontroller-features-integrated-dc-dc-for-portable-uses.htm
Although the study quoted by the OP got a lot of media attention because of MIT involvement, what is more interesting is this actual product that has been released last month: "One AAA battery! The boss must be kidding..."
This company (Silicon Labs) has managed to put a DC-DC converter in a microcontroller and have managed to do this on an actual product that you can buy now (not just a research project!). They claim to be able to run for years (even >15 years) on typical low-power applications such as data loggers that wake up for a short while take a measurement and go to sleep. This is also the first microchip that can run on one battery... if you think that adding an external DC-DC converter would do the same trick, you have to remember that the external DC-DC converter needs to be ON even during sleep mode so the micro can wake up again, which burns quite a bit of power. More articles on this product:
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206801775 http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/26/43201/silicon-labs-microcontroller-features-integrated-dc-dc-for-portable-uses.htm