Researchers aim for energy-harvesting CPUs

The National Science Foundation and the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative of Semiconductor Research Corp recently awarded a team of researchers from VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University) two grants totaling $1.75 million to create powerful, energy-efficient computer processors that can run an embedded system without battery power. The researchers based their findings on a paper published by the VCU research team in the August issue of Applied Physics Letters. The technique replaces transistors with tiny nanomagnets that can also process digital information, theoretically reducing the heat dissipation by a factor of 1000 to 10,000, according to VCU.


“The purpose of this work is to establish a new paradigm for digital computing, which will be extremely energy-efficient and hopefully allow us to pack more and more computing devices onto a chip without having to worry about excessive heat generation,” says Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, co-principal investigator for the study and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at VCU. “This [discovery] will allow us to increase the computational prowess of computers beyond what is available today.”

As processors have shrunk in accordance with Moore’s Law, engineers are packing more and more transistors onto a chip, creating a challenge for efficiently removing the heat that the transistors generate. Reducing the amount of dissipated heat when the transistor switches is considered to be the best approach to alleviating this problem.

According to Bandyopadhyay and Jayasimha Atulasimha, an assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering in the VCU School of Engineering and coprincipal investigator on the project, this research could lead to a type of digital computing system for medical devices, such as processors that physicians could implant in an epileptic patient’s brain that monitor brain signals to warn of impending seizures. This processor would run by harvesting energy only from the patient’s head movements, without requiring a battery, they claim.

Virginia Commonwealth University