Energy Management Startup Wins 2009 CleanTech Open

EcoFactor takes $250,000 prize

1 min read
Energy Management Startup Wins 2009 CleanTech Open

The Cleantech Open crowned EcoFactor, an entrant in the Smart Power category from California, as winner of the 2009 Cleantech Open, a business competition created to find, fund, and foster startup clean technology companies. EcoFactor has designed a software system that communicates with home thermostats to reduce energy use. EcoFactor won $250,000 in cash and services.

The competition also honored two runners-up; Alphabet Energy, a waste-heat recapture venture, and my personal favorite, MicroMidas, a company with technology to transform sewage into plastic.

The Open itself was limited to the entries from California, the Rocky Mountain Region, and the Pacific Northwest. However, a separate, parallel competition, run with the help of the Kauffman Foundation, offered a prize of $100,000 in services to entries from around the world. The winner in this, the Global Cleantech Open Ideas competition, was Replenish Energy of Puerto Rico, a company that uses micro algae as a source of fuel.

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Two Startups Are Bringing Fiber to the Processor

Avicena’s blue microLEDs are the dark horse in a race with Ayar Labs’ laser-based system

5 min read
Diffuse blue light shines from a patterned surface through a ring. A blue cable leads away from it.

Avicena’s microLED chiplets could one day link all the CPUs in a computer cluster together.

Avicena

If a CPU in Seoul sends a byte of data to a processor in Prague, the information covers most of the distance as light, zipping along with no resistance. But put both those processors on the same motherboard, and they’ll need to communicate over energy-sapping copper, which slow the communication speeds possible within computers. Two Silicon Valley startups, Avicena and Ayar Labs, are doing something about that longstanding limit. If they succeed in their attempts to finally bring optical fiber all the way to the processor, it might not just accelerate computing—it might also remake it.

Both companies are developing fiber-connected chiplets, small chips meant to share a high-bandwidth connection with CPUs and other data-hungry silicon in a shared package. They are each ramping up production in 2023, though it may be a couple of years before we see a computer on the market with either product.

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