The Tunable Powercosm
Electricity is broadband power. A high-voltage electric line a few inches across conveys more power than the massive engine struts that link four giant turbines to the wings of a jumbo jet.
The Powerchip Paradigm 1: Digital Power
We are entering the century of the electron. Not the information century? The communications age? The bit era? Well, bits are electrons: small buckets of them in silicon capacitors, or propelled through metal wire, or (transformed into photons) oscillating through glass or air.
The Powerchip Paradigm II: Broadband Power
“Eppur si muove” (“nevertheless, it does move”) Galileo declared, after this conviction. He dared to assert that it is the earth that rotates, not the sun. The ecclesiastical court disagreed.
The Silicon Car
A Mercedes at Comdex? There it was at the Las Vegas Convention Center, a CLK 55 coupe, and a test track, too – courtesy of its manufacturer, the first non-tech company to sponsor the world’s biggest computer trade show
Powering RF Photons
If you’re trying to power a Sun server, “clean power” is a perfect 60 Hz sine wave with rock-solid 110 volt peaks. For powering a Pentium-class chip on a motherboard, it’s a perfectly steady 1.2 volts DC.
Heavy-Iron Lite
So what about heavy-iron? The 15 to 250 MW turbines? In the Powercosm, or out? In. Some, at least. Leave it to the Economist, the Worldwatch Institute, the small-is-beautiful crowd, to tell you that micropower rules, that big power is finished, that utility-scale heavy iron has as much future as a thirty-year-old IBM 360. Micropower…