A Physics Quest for Energy Efficiency In Future Computing Technologies

As computing becomes increasingly pervasive in our daily life, it is generally recognized that energy efficiency will be one of the key design considerations for any future computing scheme. Consequently, significant research is currently ongoing on exploring new physics, material systems and system level designs to improve energy efficiency.

In this talk, I shall discuss some of our recent progresses in this regard. Specifically, the physics of ordered and correlated systems allow for fundamental improvement of the energy efficiency when a transition happens between two distinguishable states. Our recent experiments show that this theoretical promise can indeed be realized in transistors and spintronic memory devices. The resulting gain in energy efficiency can easily exceed orders of magnitude.

Speaker: Sayeef Salahuddin, UC Berkeley

Room 101