New NEC comms chips need 80 per cent less power

Tiny chips, tiny footprints

Honey, I shrunk the bills

Fewer trees will have had to lay down their lives every time you download some stupid film off Youtube, or receive a ludicrously large PDF from head office. thanks to NEC.

The Japanese chip maker has invented a tiny optical communications chip that uses one fifth of the conventional power needed to send optical signals between servers and routers.

And, if I’ve understood them correctly (www.Nikkei.net) then NEC claims it can send four times as much data with these new wonder optical chip.

The chip that integrates with signal transceiver circuitry measures 14mm square and 4.7mm thick, which is one tenth the normal size of chips that do this job.

It’s got a smaller carbon footprint too, as it can handle the equivalent of four 10 Gigabit per second signals being sent and received. It consumes just 0.6 watts, which is 20 per cent of the power needs of a conventional device.

So it uses less electricity, which means fewer fossil fuels are burnt to generate that power. And it was the trees that laid down their lives to make fossil fuels, wasn’t it?

Question: Everyone is inventing technology that uses less power. So why are our electricity bills constantly going up? Is power consuming still increasing?

The new NEC chip will be easily mounted on data communications boards and will send signals for up to 100 meters between servers and routers.

NEC hopes to have a commercial version ready around 2010.

 

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