Apparently, about 10 per cent of the electricity used in the average home or office in the EU is eaten up by devices in standby or that are switched off, and IBM is committing to do something about it.
As part of a joint research partnership with Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, the programme will attempt to make our gadgets ten times more efficient, while reducing standby power-draw to negligible levels. Project Steeper, as it's known, will also involve several other European research institutes, Infineon and GLOBALFOUNDRIES and will be partially funded by the European Union.
The research will focus on developing steep slope transistors, which will be able to operate at under 0.5V - a tenfold decrease from existing MOSFETs. This will involve the development of tunnelling field effect transistors (TFETs) based on semi-conducting nanowires which make use of quantum tunnelling to achieve improved performance.
According to project coordinator Professor Adrian Ionescu, "our vision is to share this research to enable manufacturers to build the Holy Grail in electronics, a computer that utilizes negligible energy when it's in sleep mode, which we call the zero-watt PC."
As well as reducing idle and standby power-draw, the new technology would lower the power usage of active devices by reducing the voltage required to reach maximum efficiency.
The project has been running since June and is expected to continue for three years. More details on the project, as well as the underlying science, area available from IBM.
