More than ten years ago, it was envisioned that the interconnects will be the limiters for continued increase in compute performance. Now we know that it's not the interconnects but power and energy that has been the limiter. As technology scaling continues providing abundance of transistors, and new architectures to continue to deliver performance in a given power envelope, we need to revisit the role of interconnects.
One of the greatest challenges of the 21st century will be to understand, invent, and engineer new mechanisms and materials for energy production, energy storage and energy transport to counter the deleterious environmental and political impacts of our long-standing reliance on crude oil. Current renewable energy conversion and storage technologies are too expensive, too inefficient, or both, substantially limiting their use and global impact.
Transition metal oxides exhibit extraordinary phenomena not observed in any other materials class. For example, they show “Mott” metal-insulator transitions (MITs) that are caused by strong electron correlations. While properties have been studied extensively in bulk materials, oxide heterostructures allow for new approaches to control their properties and to study the fundamental physics, through the manipulation of carrier concentration by composition, modulation doping, field effect, two-dimensionality and quantum confinement, which cannot be realized with bulk materials.
Life in the time of Dennard scaling was relatively easy for architects and the computer industry. Every process generation delivered twice as many transistors to a chip that could run at a 1.4 times faster clock rate and consume the same power as the previous generation. General purpose processors spent this bounty on deep pipelining for high clock rates, extreme out-of-order execution to mine instruction-level parallelism, and large on-chip caches.
World Governments cannot sustainably fund uneconomical schemes of incentives and global projects aimed at slowing the acceleration of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Not even at maximal implementation would wind, solar, tidal energy, low emission vehicles, carbon capture and sequestration, and further emission controls on carbon-based electrical power generation and industrial plants have a significant near-term impact.
For over 60 years the oil Industry has been trying to find a way to use microbes to recover a significant percentage (1% to 10%) of the 6.2 trillion barrels of oil trapped in global oil fields with little or no success. Titan Oil Recovery founded in 2001 has developed, tested, and treated 20 oil fields in California and Canada over the past four years-plus with its proprietary Microbial Enhanced Oil Recover (MEOR) technology called the Titan Process® with great commercial success.
Organic photovoltaics (OPV), solar cells based on carbon-based semiconductor materials, are a potential low cost alternative to conventional inorganic semiconductor photovoltaics. They enable the production of lightweight, flexible, and even semitransparent and light polarizing solar panels. This could open up applications that are not practical with inorganic cells. Examples include power producing LCD displays or tinted windows and ultralight large area flexible panels for field or space applications.
Nanoelectronics linear scaling appeals to new 3D integration schemes in order to continue Moore’s law. Unique opportunities exist to increase the device's performance, system complexity and also to reduce power consumption of mobile handheld objects. New design and functional architecture will be possible by mixing logic and memory devices to save power consumption and introduce new applications by using neuromorphic or bio inspired approaches.
Thermal radiation from nuclear reactions in our sun is the sunlight which sustains life on earth today and powered the photosynthetic processes responsible for the inexpensive fossil fuels which have made possible mankind’s present prosperity. Investigations of photovoltaics and photoelectrocatalysts for artificial solar photosynthesis have been ongoing for decades and the fundamental processes involved are well known.
The interconnect fabric is taking an ever-more dominant portion of the power budget and optical interconnects are already used today within datacenters for rack to rack interconnection to overcome the limits of electrical signaling. However, the switches interconnecting these racks have inadequate capacity to continue to scale with CMOS-based technology due to fundamental limitation of on-chip interconnects and power consumption and pin-count of scheduler ASICs .