#Evercomm co-founder Ted Chen holding their wireless sensor chip.

  #Evercomm co-founder Ted Chen holding their wireless sensor

chip.
Credit: Image courtesy of Nanyang Technological University
A new technology from Nanyang Technological University,

Singapore (NTU Singapore), could help companies and factories cut

their energy bills by as much as 10 per cent.

The new algorithm is able to analyse energy consumption by tapping

on sensors in computer chips already found in equipment such as

computers, servers, air conditioning systems and industrial

machinery.

Such computer chips are needed for a host of functions such as to

measure temperature, log data traffic and monitor the workload of

computer processors.

By combining it with externally-placed sensors, such as those that

monitor ambient temperature, the new technology can integrate and

analyse all the operational data and recommend energy-saving

solutions with almost no upfront cost.

This new algorithm which extract all such readily data and turn

them into a treasure trove of information that can be studied and

analysed is developed by Asst Prof Wen Yonggang from NTU's

School of Computer Engineering.

It has been licensed by an NTU-incubated company, Evercomm

Singapore.

Asst Prof Wen recently won the 2015 Datacenter Dynamics Award

Asia Pacific. The "Oscars" of the data centre industry, these awards

are often dominated by industry giants like Equinix, Huawei, NEC

and Starhub.

Semi-conductor industry welcomes new technology

In a typical semi-conductor factory which produces computer chips

and components for computers and mobile devices, the annual

electricity bill could easily reach S$50 million and more.

Mr Ted Chen, co-founder and product architect of Evercomm

Singapore, who worked with Asst Prof Wen to commercialise this

technology, said: "With NTU's new analytic engine, such large

semi-conductor factories and campuses could save up to S$1 million

a year without a need to change much of their hardware, and

instead, tune their operation and time their energy usage."

"The new algorithm allows us to use the most cost-effective way to

find out where we can save energy, and our performance can be

guaranteed by using real-time data."

Evercomm, a two-year-old company, already has a few semi-

conductor manufacturers as their clients, of which one is a heavy

electricity user in Singapore, GlobalFoundries, the second largest

foundry in the world.

The latter's management team is committed to sustainable energy

consumption by providing ample opportunities to adopt local

innovations, as proven by being the first in the industry to engage

Evercomm's energy analytic services.

In Taiwan, Evercomm is engaged by National Dong Hwa University

and Chunghwa Telecom to deploy their energy analytic engine

across the entire university campus.

"By combining the software algorithm with hardware sensors, we

can find out exactly how much cooling a room needs, whether there

is an oversupply of cooling and so adjust the air flow and

temperature to achieve the best balance," said Mr Chen, an alumnus

of NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Even without deploying external sensors, Evercomm can achieve up

to five per cent energy savings for companies, which are facing

increased regulations worldwide on their energy usage and resulting

carbon footprint.

This will help Singapore companies meet the stringent regulations

set by the Building and Construction Authority for its Green Mark

Scheme, allowing them to reduce their carbon footprint and energy

usage, added Mr Chen.

Next phase: Datacentre industry and the HDB heartlands

Evercomm is looking to expand its expertise into data centre

industry. It has successful deployed a pilot test at the NTU Green

Datacentre, saving five per cent of its monthly electricity bill.

In a datacentre consisting of hundreds of computer servers, over

half of the energy costs are spent on cooling these servers through

air-conditioning.

"Servers which are performing intensive computing will generate a

lot of heat," added Prof Wen, an expert in cloud computing and

green data centres. "If we know which of these servers are, we can

spread out the computing load and so reduce the heat emitted by

the servers, in turn reducing the energy needed to cool them."

Another large potential market is the heartlands.

"Our next challenge is to look into how we can deploy our energy

saving analytics for the heartlands -- into apartments and housing

estates -- in partnership with international urbanisation consultant

Surbana," said Mr Chen.

"We hope that our local innovation can help to reduce energy usage

and carbon emissions of companies in Singapore and overseas, help

to mitigate climate change which is already happening as we

speak."#...............