Electronics Globalpress Summit Conference - News
roundup
Hamsters could be the answer to the excessive use of energy by
the US, it was stated at the
Globalpress Summit
Conference in San Francisco, on April Fool's day.
It is costing the US $1.4bn a day to buy the 20m barrels of oil
it consumes daily. Half of that is used to generate electricity,
and half is used to power automobiles. However, a nifty idea from
Japan, the Hamster Car, could solve 50 per cent of the energy
problem.
Hamsters are good at running around inside wheels and, if enough
of them could be put inside the four wheels of a car, you could get
traction, but how many would you need?
It takes an engineer to want to work out that problem, and a
distinguished engineer, John East CEO of Actel, did the
maths in San Francisco and came up with the answer.
Assuming that a unit of hamster power is a thousandth of a unit
of horsepower, so that 1hp = 1K units of hamster power, and
assuming that the efficiency of hamster power generation in an
automotive application is 64 per cent, East concluded that 100,000
hamsters would be needed to generate 64hp.
That's fine, but there are problems yet to be solved with
hamster power. For instance the poo from 100,000 hamsters will
degrade to form methane which is the worst of all the greenhouse
gases.
And since there are 250m cars in the US, with 100,000 hamsters
per car, the corn required to feed this many hamsters would mean
the US would have to import enormous amounts of corn which would
see the world price of corn rocket.
So, without solving the poo and corn problems, the Hamster Car
could create an environmental and economic disaster.
"We are decades away from solving the power problem from the
power generation standpoint, so we need to use less",said East.
East's interim solution to the energy crisis is that the world
should adopt Actel's IGLOO flash-based
FPGAs which consume 1000 times less power than
competitors' FPGAs, and use Actel's Fusion programmable system
chips for intelligent system management and efficient motor
control, which have the smallest footprint of any programmable
logic device in the industry.