Electronics and the Environment

Published:2011/7/1 1:17:00 Author:Phyllis From:SeekIC

About the essence of the 80 or so years old modern electronics industry, nothing captures better than Moore’s Law, which has enabled many of the wonders of the modern world. The focus of electronic industry has been on making things faster, smaller and cheaper.

Today, electronics is also looking for goals that was not a concern in the industry’s formative years but that has implications for the future of the planet reducing power consumption. This industry is trying to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels like oil and coal of society for generating electric power, which refers to reduce the CO2 emissions that many scientists have fingered as a prime cause for global warming.

The relationship between the evolution of electrics and power efficiency follows a trend line that predates. For example, today’s average laptop is massively more energy-efficient than the early vacuum-tube computers as measured by computations per kilowatt-hour. Project this trend out a decade, and some believe we’ll have laptops that run on ambient light and never need to be plugged in.

Imagine that the solid-state revolution had never occurred and we were still living in a world of vacuum-tube computing. Not only would our laptops be much bigger, but they would require much more electricity to perform the same operation— about a trillion times more.

From the vacuum-tube ENIAC era to the present, computations per kilowatt-hour have doubled every 1.6 years, and ENIAC operated at less than 1 kiloflops (103 floating-point operations/second) per kilowatt-hour, while today’s laptops can theoretically operate at 1 petaflops (1015 flops)/kilowatt-hour.

Thanks to Intel’s announcement in early May that it was commercializing its three-dimensional "trigate" transistor in a 22-nm microprocessor, the continuation of Moore’s Law and Koomey’s trend line for computations/kilowatt-hour is assured for at least a few more years. That’s because the novel fin architecture of the trigate transistor consumes less than half the power at the same performance level as a 2-D planar transistor on a 32-nm chip, according to Intel. Smaller, faster, cheaper.......and dramatically more power efficient.

Extrapolating the power/performance trend line out a few years, Koomey believes it will have profound implications for the evolution of mobile computing and, in particular, the prospects for harnessing the information-gathering potential of wireless sensor networks. That’s all. As the number of data centers continues to rise, the operations they run will become that much more energy-efficient. Today, the world’s data centers account for about 1 percent of total electric energy consumed. Theoretically, all things being equal, a doubling of the number of data centers that use 3-D transistor IC architectures would have a negligible impact on the total energy requirement, while operating at much higher performance levels. The related model is 02S30.

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