Ultra-Low-Voltage, Beyond CMOS Microelectronics

Despite ever-improving computing efficiency, information technology (IT) represents the fastest growing energy consumer and will have significant implications for U.S. energy consumption. This impending cliff threatens the nation's ability to solve important problems across science, technology, national security, and energy. Without improvements in computing efficiency, the explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications will exponentially increase energy consumption. A complete rethinking of how computing is performed today is needed to develop the next-generation of beyond-CMOS microelectronics. Our scientific mission is built on a core guiding principle that a significant opportunity exists for use-inspired basic science to enable highly energy efficient computing by exploiting correlated phenomena and consequently lowering the operating voltage. Orders of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency are possible by exploiting correlations (electronic charge/spin and dipolar). We aim to design and manipulate this energy barrier to specifically reduce the operating voltage substantially below what is achievable by today's CMOS technology. This fundamental physics approach to solving systems-level techno-economic problems can lead to dramatically lower energy consumption, in addition to a completely new hierarchy of logic-in-memory information technology building blocks.