Gallium may be an element from the far reaches of the periodic table, but in the view of researchers at Fujitsu Laboratories its application in power conversion will have a radical impact on server costs - effectively cutting their energy draw (and therefore cost) by more than 20%.

Modern servers are power-hungry animals, but their staple diet is DC power not standard AC. That means the AC current supplied by electricity companies to data centres needs to be converted to "stabilised" DC and stepped down to a suitable voltage. The problem is that there is a constant and substantial loss of power at each conversion stage, even before the server starts doing any work.

Today's power conversion units typically use silicon chips to run that conversion process; and although such devices have increased their efficiency significantly in recent years, power conversion still accounts for about one-third of the total cost of ownership of a server.

Now engineers at Fujitsu in Japan have revealed that by using gallium nitride (GaN) transistors instead of silicon for the power switching, they can dramatically reduce the power dissipation - estimates suggest by as much as 70%.

That means that if applied to data centres, GaN "high electron-mobility transistors" would be able to reduce total power consumption in a facility by about 12%, predicts Fujitsu. Even better, such units can also be made much smaller than conventional power converters, opening up the possibility of putting them directly onto server boards.

But servers are not the only targets. Because of their diminished size, GaN converters will spell the end to external transformers for lots of other electronic hardware - laptops, games machines, smartphones and more - with the unit disappearing into the device itself.

Expect the first products with a direct wire to AC in 2012.

Data feed

• Around 40% of the electricity coming into a traditional data centre is lost during the transformation and distribution process by the uninterruptible power supply, power distribution unit and server power supply components. (Source: 42u)

• The average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of a data centre is 2.5. (PUE is a measure of the power coming into a data centre against what is actually used to run a single unit of the processing). (Source: Uptime Institute)