I was on my way to office this morning when suddenly a news from Class95 FM, one of the radio stations at my workplace caught my ear. It’s a news about a SUPER CHIP which is made in Singapore.

Here’s the full news extracted from StraitsTimes Singapore…

A SINGAPORE-American brain trust has made a new microchip they claim is seven times more powerful than its existing cousin.

The icing on this cake: This new chip consumes 30 times less power.

Mobile phones that could need re-charging just once every two weeks and surgically-implanted devices lasting several lifetimes could be a reality a few years down the road, once this 2mm-by-2mm chip finds its way into the heart of electronic devices.

The chip, unveiled at the International Solid-State Circuit conference in San Francisco yesterday, can make such a leap over current chip technology because of its design, said Associate Professor Yeo Kiat Seng, who heads the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering’s circuits and systems division at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

Traditionally, to get better performance out of a microchip, more power is required.

The additional power is used to drown out the interference generated by the chip. This interference is known in engineering parlance as ‘noise’.

Over time, it has become harder and harder to make microchips any more powerful than they already were, especially since smaller chips – which are in demand for portable devices like mobile phones – generate more noise than larger ones.

Instead of passing more power through the chip to boost its performance, Prof Yeo and his co-researchers harnessed the interference generated to do this.

This out-of-the-box concept for the microchip, which was invented back in 1947, came in 2005 from Rice University computer scientist Professor Krisna Palem, who is also the director of NTU’s Institute of Sustainable Nanoelectronics.

Since then, ‘thousands of man hours’ have been burned to develop the idea, said Prof Yeo.

When the first batch of microchips was delivered last December, it had to be put through repeated test runs because no one on the NTU or Rice teams could believe it worked so well.

Intel Microprocessor Technology Lab director Shekhar Borkar called the ‘energy and speed advantages’ of the new technology a ‘significant achievement’.

Prof Yeo reckons it will take about four years for actual products to appear, since chip-makers will need time to design chips tailored to specific products.

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Just imagine how convenient we are if our mobile phone or digital gadget just need re-charging once a fortnight? Or how grateful those who has heart condition when they learnt that pacemaker can last for their entire life?

The evolution of microchip has entered a new phase, this time round with the use of nano technology, a technology that deals with structures of the size 100 nanometers or smaller – something that seems impossible a century ago.

Now the Lion City has their own chip. I wonder when we gonna have our own chip?. With the government support, through their ICT grant, I don’t see a reason why we can’t.