The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently awarded funding for “green” research. Last month, NSF awarded a five-year grant totaling $24.5 million to the University of California, Berkeley to develop a research center that could reduce the power that electronics such as laptops consume by a million-fold.
The research center or the Center for Energy Efficient Electronic Sciences (E3S) will be a multi-institutional team of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Contra Costa College, Los Angeles Trade Technical College, and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Through their research, these engineers and scientists hope to reduce the amount of power required to run electronics, which they believe will open up the gates for new technological advances that are currently inhibited by high power needs. According to the press release, such “applications include keyboard-less computing using voice recognition systems or software that can automatically—and accurately—translate spoken words into a different language.”
The research will mainly focus on making more efficient transistors for the basic logic switch. According to Eli Yablonovitch, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and the director of the Center for E3S, in a media release, “The transistors in the microprocessor are what draw the most power in a computer. … When you feel the heat from under a laptop, blame it on the transistors.”
The research team plans to conduct research in four areas, which include nanoelectronics, nanomechanics, nanomagnetics, and nanophotonics. The nanoelectronics researchers will focus on creating semiconductor millivolt switching. The nanomechanics team will focus on creating the low voltage nanomechanical switches, while the nanomagnetics team is going to utilize nanomagnetic technology to create low power logic switches. Nanophotonics researchers will work on creating technology that uses only a few photons per bit.
The results, researchers are hoping, will be a basic logic switch that can operate by using a fraction of the amount of energy that microprocessors currently use, thus enabling a host of new electronic technology.
On top of the money funding the actual research, the center will also fund an educational outreach component, which is designed to allow non-University of California first and second year students from Contra Costa college and LA Trade Technical College to take classes at a UC campus, making their transfers in their upperclass years easier.
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