At its developer event in San Francisco earlier this week Intel demonstrated an ultra low power research processor running on solar power. Sriram Vangal , Principal Research Scientist,   Microprocessor Research, at Intel Labs, came on stage during CEO Paul Otellini’s opening keynote on September 13 to unveil a next generation chip, called "Near Threshold Voltage Core”.

Vangal explained that it was an experimental prototype working near the threshhold voltage of the transistor and still capable of running Windows. He showed it was running on a solar cell the size of a postage stamp alone by briefly masking the chip from the light : the animation run by the chip, immediately froze.

A BE in Electronics Engineering from Bangalore University, 1993 and an MTech in Computer Engineering from Nebraska-Lincoln ,1995, Sriram obtained his PhD from Linkopings Universitat in Sweden, 2005.

Sriram joined Intel in 1995, working on two generations of the i960 embedded RISC processors. He joined the advanced prototyping team at Circuit Research Labs in 1997 and played a lead role in the development of several “first” successful silicon prototypes: 5+GHz integer execution unit (2001), high-throughput floating-point units (2003) and TCP/IP off-load engines (2004).

Sriram was the technical lead for the advanced prototype team that designed the industry's first single-chip 80-core, sub-100W “Polaris” TeraFLOPS processor (2006), and more recently the 48-iA core “Rock Creek” single-chip cloud computer (SCC). ( Intel career details from Sriram’s Linked-In entry).

We have for a few days, a video on Sriram's demo in our Tech Video slot

Link to video of Paul Otellini keynore including Sriram Vangal solar chip demo approx 6 mins into the talk http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2011/sf/keynote/110913_pso/f.htm  Sep 15 2011