Technical Editor Margery Conner's PowerSource streams the latest developments in electronic power design and related technologies.
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Blog
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Three grapes power processor and display
Sep 4 2008 11:19AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (4) |
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Here’s a picture from a BBC article on ultra-low-power work being done at Texas Instruments:
Three grapes are powering a digital clock that consists of TI’s low-power processor, the MSP430, driving a digital display. I asked TI what kind of power you can expect from three grapes, and the answer came back: 2 uA at 3V.
This reminds me of the way Philips marketed their CoolRunner CPLD family back in the 90’s with ads showing a CoolRunner CPLD powered by 6 grapefruits and drawing something like 60 uA. (CoolRunner was later sold to Xilinx.)
Related entries in: Power Sources/Controllers | Power Supplies |
Reader Comments
at 9/8/2008 1:43:46 PM, Chris PE said:
AWESOME!!! I still have a potato LCD clock on my desk at work. Now , a real processor on three grapes is great. It looks like everyone tries to save energy.I think that if we all pich in it is never too late to help our Earth.Interesting post.Thank you Margery :o)
at 9/16/2008 3:55:23 PM, JEB said:
This news is grape!
at 9/18/2008 1:58:37 AM, Christian said:
There's nothing new under the sun. I ran a Motorola CMOS 14605 processor in 1984 on three lemons. The processor controlled also an 4 digit LCD display directly, and ran continuously for more than a week on these three series couplen lemons. It would have run longer but the three lemons started to rot and some kind of fungus started to grow on them... Additionally, to really show off, I replaced the PCB by a plain piece of paper glued to a glass plate! The traces were drawn on the paper with a pencil, and the pins of the microcontroller and the display were connected to the "paper PCB" by small drops of conductive glue... Sadly I have no picture of my installement :( Propably the clock frequency is also very low in this grape demo? My trick was to run on a 32.768Hz clock frequency to reduce the current consumtion even furter ;)
at 10/15/2008 3:36:23 AM, Saigua said:
How about running a few nVidia 9800s off a lap-band (i.e. excess peristalsis) or an Oreo-powered server blade? I sometimes have some chai left over if only the laptop would run by mulching that for me.
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