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.
Bio:
Sayeef Salahuddin is an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in the transport physics of nano structures currently focusing on novel electronic and spintronic devices for low power logic and memory applications. Salahuddin received a number of awards including the NSF CAREER award, the IEEE Nanotechnology Early Career Award, the Young Investigator Awards from the AFOSR and the ARO and best paper awards from IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems and from the VLSI-TSA conference. He is on the editorial board of IEEE Electron Devices Letters and currently chairs the Electron Devices Society committee on Nanotechnology. Together with Prof. Chenming Hu, Salahuddin has recently launched the Berkeley Device Modeling Center.
