NTU said Tuesday (Sept. 4) that the Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics, a joint initiative with Houston-based Rice University, would focus on designing and developing "next generation" embedded chips that consume over 100 times less energy than current models, and will also be cheaper to conceptualize and produce.

The university plans to contribute S$4 million ($2.6 million) in seed funding to the facility over the next two years. The institute will be directed by Rice University computer science professor Krishna Palem, and will also receive assistance and regular visits from a "network of excellence" led by Palem and including U.S. electronics and computing experts.

NTU claimed the institute would "radically change the approach to chip design, and evolve a design methodology that is platform-independent" by adopting approaches such as the probabilistic CMOS invented by Palem and his team.

"A major goal of this collaboration is to exploit the exponential rate at which the size of electronic components have been shrinking," Palem said. "The key is tying the costs for design, energy consumption and production to the value that the computed information has for the user."

NTU said in a statement that the institute was already designing and building production prototypes for new chips, which it hopes will be used in consumer and medical applications that require "longer battery life, less energy consumption and faster turnaround in new designs."