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unch a product, Monday. The company, which has 45 employees and is hiring research scientists and engineers, is backed by venture firms NEA, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and August Capital.SuVolta is not making chips but licensing its PowerShrink technology to leading semiconductor companies like Japan's Fujitsu, which it revealed as its first licensee. The PowerShrink platform addresses the primary cause of excess power consumption by minimizing the electrical variation of the millions of transistors on a chip."When you play 'Angry Birds' on your phone, the battery is dead after an hour," said SuVolta CEO Bruce McWilliams.


But if the chip power consumption is cut in half, you can put twice as much stuff on there and use it longer."John Barber, a semiconductor Advertisementanalyst at Gartner, said power conservation is crucial for all kinds of mobile devices, whether used for work or entertainment. Battery technology is improving, but chips that use less power are a big part of the solution."Chip vendors are under tremendous pressure to reduce power because reducing power extends the battery life," Barber said. "Today's smartphones and media tablets need lower-power chips. A 50 percent reduction in active power consumption would be a significant advance."SuVolta was founded in 2006 under the name DSM Solutions. At the time, it was trying to lower the power voltage of chips through a technology known as JFETs, but the costs were prohibitive because of extensive changes required of factories and manufacturing processes.Kleiner Perkins, the company's lead investor, asked McWilliams, who was then CEO of Tessera Technologies, to figure out if the company had any chance of making it or needed to be shut down.


McWilliams asked Scott Thompson, an Intel (INTC) alumnus who is now SuVolta's chief technology officer, to help him out. Thompson figured out a way to drastically lower power consumption without building new manufacturing facilities. The company has been quietly working with Fujitsu since fall 2009."This is an unattacked space that is wide open for invention," Thompson said. "You can do cleantech from two ways: Make things more efficient, or generate power from clean sources. We're reducing the power used by mobile devices by 50 percent. If you care about power more than anything, this is the technology for you."

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