Posted by the author on June 30th, 2011
One of the main concerns in the electronic industry right now is the impact it could inflict on the environment, since electronics are one of the major contributors to global warming. One of the resolutions that electronics industries came up with is to minimize power consumption. Although this was not defined in their first to-do, it is now one of the industry’s main goals.
Reducing everyone’s reliance on fossil fuels for generating electricity will drastically minimize carbon dioxide emissions, which has been pinpointed by many thousands of researchers as the major culprit to rapid climate change.
From the last quarter of the 20th century up to now, the modern electronics industry has been focusing on manufacturing things in a fast and downsized manner; and more importantly, at an inexpensive, but high quality value. All these things were best realized by Intel’s co-founder, Gordon Moore, who predicted the Moore’s law, which is very relevant and true, specifically to the modern electronics world.
Moore’s law states that over the history of computing, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years, and that this trend will continue for more than half a century until about 2020 or later.
Moreover, innovations in electronics and the efficiency in power follow a steeper slope than that of Moore’s Law. For example, laptops nowadays using LED or LCD screens are greatly more power-efficient (measured per kilowatt hour) than those of computers using CRT monitors which were introduced in 1950s. Projecting that kind of trend, experts believe that maybe one day we could have laptops run only by ambient light or heat, which would not need any plugging to an AC source.
The computations for power consumption measured per kilowatt hour from the vacuum-tube era in the 1950s up to the present have doubled every 18 months. And recently, the 3D transistor is an innovation in electronics that will play a very important role in the history and evolution of technological advances in power conservation.
Early this May, Intel announced and commercialized a new 3D “trigate” transistor implemented on a 22nm or 0.022um technology ,which still follows the trend of Moore’s Law. What’s revolutionary with this 3D “trigate” transistor is that it consumes power less than half that of the 2D planar transistor implemented on a 32nm technology with the same performance level. Therefore, this new trigate transistor is much smaller in size, faster, cheaper, and is definitely more power-efficient than any other microprocessors nowadays.
Since data centers continue rising in number, running their operations will be more power-efficient. According to studies, data centers worldwide account for about one percent of the entire power consumed. Ideally, the impact will be negligible on the total power requisite when the number of data centers that use 3D transistor-integrated circuit architectures is doubled, while it operates at a higher level of performance.
Hopefully this technology will become widely accepted and incorporated in the near future.
Did you know that the first computer was nearly as big as a full four-bedroom house? Imagine the electric bill to operate one of those! A computer such as that needed about a billion or maybe a trillion times more power than the laptops of today. Yet with so many consumers using electronics, innovations that help lesson one’s electronic carbon footprint are always a good investment in the future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sera Filson is a writer, entrepreneur and professional student who’s currently pursuing a B.A. in Business Management. To manage her busy life, Sera stays organized using Outlook, which uses Intermedia’s Exchange Hosting.