In a breakthrough for energy-efficient computing,
engineers at the University of California-Berkeley have shown for the
first time that magnetic chips can operate with the lowest fundamental
level of energy dissipation possible under the laws of thermodynamics.
The
findings mean that dramatic reductions in power consumption are
possible — as much as one-millionth the amount of energy per operation
used by transistors in modern computers.
This is
critical for mobile devices, which demand powerful processors that can
run for a day or more on small, lightweight batteries.
Data centres
On
a larger industrial scale, as computing increasingly moves into ‘the
cloud’, the electricity demands of the giant cloud data centres are
multiplying, collectively taking an increasing share of the country’s —
and world’s — electrical grid.
Reducing energy needed
“We
wanted to know how small we could shrink the amount of energy needed
for computing,” said senior author Jeffrey Bokor, a UC Berkeley
professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences.
“The
biggest challenge in designing computers and, in fact, all our
electronics today is reducing their energy consumption,” he added in a
paper appeared in the peer-reviewed journal
Science Advances
. Lowering energy use is a relatively recent shift in focus in chip
manufacturing after decades of emphasis on packing greater numbers of
increasingly tiny and faster transistors onto chips.
“Making
transistors go faster was requiring too much energy,” said Bokor, who
is also the deputy director the Centre for Energy Efficient Electronics
Science, a Science and Technology Centre at UC Berkeley funded by the
National Science Foundation. “The chips were getting so hot they’d just
melt.”
Magnetic computing emerged as a promising
candidate because the magnetic bits can be differentiated by direction,
and it takes just as much energy to get the magnet to point left as it
does to point right. — IANS
The findings mean that dramatic reductions in power consumption are possible
Source:- The Hindu, 14-Mar-2016
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