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Texas Instruments wants to export what it knows about curbing power consumption in phones to the world outside.
The American Dallas-based company has already come up with a series of chips that can be inserted into portable ultrasound devices to cut power consumption by up to 20 per cent. The new chips also reduce signal noise by 40 per cent.
The idea behind the push is fairly simple. The company has already made the silicon, and with some tweaks, can sell it to other customers. Much of the work TI has conducted in power management for mobile phones was not performed because of high electricity prices, said Bill Krenik, chief technical officer of the wireless terminal business unit at TI.
Later this year, TI hopes to make a splash with the third generation of its OMAP platform, a collection of chips for making mobile phones.
Mobile phones used to be huge and batteries are one of the more costly components. (Remember Michael Douglas with that shoe phone in the movie Wall Street? He probably gave himself radiation therapy.) So TI originally concentrated on energy efficiency to reduce the size and costs associated with lithium ion battery packs.
Krenik explained that carriers also continued to want longer run times on their phones. "In a phone, you are limited to a couple of watts," he said. "There is a thermal limit too."
Along with medical equipment, Texas Instruments will also look at digital TVs. No one wants to put a 50-inch plasma on the wall that's blowing more heat than the furnace, after all.
TI has come up with one component that cuts digital TV power by six watts, said Dave Freeman, system engineering manager at TI. He added that TI sells a lot of digital signal processors, the same chips TI sells for mobile phones and the inverters that go with solar panels.
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