New Industry Products

Power Chips Debuts Automotive Chip Technology

September 24, 2002 by Jeff Shepard

Power Chips plc (Gibraltar), a subsidiary of Borealis Exploration Ltd., announced that it could increase an automobile engine's effective power output by 75 percent through a new power generation technology that increases the ability of a car's engine to convert fuel into useful power by capturing waste heat energy and converting it into electricity.

Power Chips™ are designed to capture the wasted heat energy of a typical car and convert it into electricity that can be used to power ancillary systems. By eliminating the secondary loads from the car's engine, all of the mechanical output can be directed into the drivetrain, allowing auto manufacturers to design lighter, more fuel-efficient engines without sacrificing horsepower and torque. In new hybrid vehicles, the increased power could translate directly into improved acceleration and range for electric motors.

Power Chips are wafer-thin, fingernail-sized diodes that use quantum mechanical thermo-tunneling to generate electricity from heat. The Power Chips discs feature two electrodes separated by a gap of less than 20 nanometers, through which the hottest electrons tunnel to create an electrical current. Power Chips are silent, nonpolluting, solid-state devices that are scalable as arrays to meet any size power load. The devices can generate electricity from heat produced by any primary energy source, including geothermal, coal, gasoline, natural gas, methane and hydrogen.