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from the resist-the-urge-to-get-amped-up dept.
According to the National Resource Defense Council, Americans waste up to $19 billion annually in electricity costs due to "vampire appliances," always-on digital devices in the home that suck power even when they are turned off.
But University of Utah electrical and computer engineering professor Massood Tabib-Azar and his team of engineers have come up with a way to produce microscopic electronic switches for appliances and devices that can grow and dissolve wires inside the circuitry that instantly connect and disconnect electrical flow. With this technology, consumer products such as smartphones and computer laptops could run at least twice as long on a single battery charge, and newer all-digital appliances such as televisions and video game consoles could be much more power efficient.
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"Whenever they are off, they are not completely off, and whenever they are on, they may not be completely on," says Tabib-Azar, who also is a professor with the Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) initiative. "That uses battery life. It heats up the device, and it's not doing anything for you. It's completely wasted power."Tabib-Azar and his team have devised a new kind of switch for electronic circuits that uses solid electrolytes such as copper sulfide to literally grow a wire between two electrodes when an electrical current passes through them, turning the switch on. When you reverse the polarity of the electrical current, then the metallic wire between the electrodes breaks down -- leaving a gap between them -- and the switch is turned off. A third electrode is used to control this process of growing and breaking down the wire.
He did not get the memo--reducing vampire current is not what the Internet of Things is all about.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Thursday October 27 2016, @04:29PM
TLDR: If you don't force the supply factories to use better designs and components through regulation, they'll never compete on quality and prices won't go down for higher efficiency supplies.
When it comes to logic components, there are plenty of incentives for fabs and consumers to bring TDP down and battery life up.
However, when it comes to on-grid power supplies, the consumers don't notice the difference so the factories keep producing inefficient PSUs using low cost components. This affects both small chargers ( http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html [righto.com] ) to the power supplies you'd find in appliances (e.g. the bronze \ silver \ gold rating in PSUs and what you're fridge is using).
The only thing that works there is forcing the manufacturers to use higher quality components in ALL their products by regulating minimum efficiency ratings. Sometimes it comes from government like the EPA's Energy Star. Sometimes it's the OEMs that put preemptive pressures like 2007's ATX12V v2.3 PSUs as the EPA \ FCC threatens to intervene. Regardless, if the government were to ban all supplies under 75% efficiency, the industry will be forced to abandon inefficient designs and parts. Eventually the costs will even go down since it's roughly the same production times and material bills once it's scaled.
compiling...