Low-power

Israel's CompuLab, makers of the fit-PC range of energy efficient mini-PCs, has announced a new miniature computer powered by NVIDIA's Tegra 2 processing platform. The Trim-Slice computer is said to offer the rich multimedia capabilities and user experience of a full-size PC at only a fraction of the power draw. It benefits from a fanless design, Wireless-N connectivity, solid state memory and expansion via both a full size and a micro SD card slots. Read More

Adopting a new, highly automated and reconfigurable approach to hardware acceleration, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have come up with a way to harness the unused silicon real estate in smartphones – the so-called "dark silicon" – as special-purpose processors dynamically optimized to perform the most common tasks in an efficient way. Read More

As its name suggests, Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology delivers electrical power via Ethernet cabling. The technology is typically used to power VoIP phones, wireless LAN access points, cameras and other low power, network-related devices. SkinnyBytes has now announced a line of computers engineered for low voltage and extremely low power consumption that are able to receive all their power over a standard network cable via PoE. Read More

Fujitsu's new wireless outpatient registration and information system has just been launched. Should a user need to visit a medical center operating the system, slotting a chipped-card into a special device will wirelessly register the outpatient and provide information about a scheduled appointment, where to go and what wait time can be expected. Read More

Gizmag caught up with Hanvon at China's Consumer Electronics Show in Qingdao this last weekend and took a closer look at the company's new tablet computer, the Touchpad B10. Benefiting from Intel's ultra-low-power processor and a couple of gigabytes of system memory, the Windows 7 multi-touch tablet also features a built-in camera and both VGA and HDMI display ports for onward connectivity to either a monitor or television. Read More

Efforts to capture energy from the human body usually focus on harnessing the kinetic energy of the body’s movement. However the human body is also generating energy in the form of heat that could also be used to run low power electronic devices. New energy-scavenging systems under development at MIT could generate electricity just from differences in temperature between the body (or other warm object) and the surrounding air. Read More

Researchers have developed a solar-powered sensor system that is just nine cubic millimeters in size. It is 1,000 times smaller than comparable commercial counterparts and can harvest energy from its surroundings to operate nearly perpetually. The system could enable new biomedical implants as well as building and bridge-monitoring devices. It could also vastly improve the efficiency and cost of current environmental sensor networks designed to detect movement or track air and water quality. Read More

The superfast computers of tomorrow will likely be able to manipulate individual electrons, harnessing their charge and magnetism to achieve massive data storage and outstanding processing speeds at very low power requirements. But how exactly do you go about manipulating single electrons independently, without affecting the ones nearby? Princeton University's Jason Petta has recently demonstrated a way to do just that in a breakthrough for the field of spintronics that brings faster and low-power number-crunching closer to reality. Read More

In a recent issue of the journal Nature, researchers from the University of Twente, Netherlands, explain how they succeeded in transferring magnetically coded information directly into a semiconductor, for the first time at room temperatures. Meanwhile, Toshiba announced at the International Electronics Devices Meeting (IEDM) it has developed a MOSFET transistor harnessing spintronics, demonstrating stable, fast and low-power performance. Read More