A radical approach to making the electronics in cell phones could cut the power consumption of 
cell phones anywhere from 10 to 100 times, while also dramatically reducing the size and cost.
The mobile phone of tomorrow faces competing demands: the need for more and more sophisticated ways of using available bandwidth and the need to accommodate ever-more power-hungry procesasing. Benjamin Vigoda, research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, MA, and research associate at MIT, says the solution may come from an unexpected approach: replacing the combination of analog and digital circuitry used today with what he calls “analog logic.”
Vigoda has already built a prototype chip using his approach, which is now being tested for accuracy, power consumption, and noise, among other things. He says a cell phone using the technology could be completed in five years.
Today’s cell phones already use specialized analog components for sending and receiving high frequencies, for example, which are too fast for digital processing to handle. Meanwhile, digital components handle computational functions, such as error correction, with programmable, general purpose logic gates. Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact
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