At this week’s International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2013), Holst Centre and imec presented an ultra-low power processor that operates reliably at near-threshold voltages. The processor delivers clock speeds up to 1MHz at voltages down to 0.4 V. In tests based on a Fast Fourier Transform use case, it consumed only 79 µW – a fraction of the power consumption at standard voltages. “Energy-efficient data processing will be vital for a wide range of emerging applications from Body...