Power Bits: Nanomagnets And Gmail
Nanomagnets
Imagine a portable electronic device with no batteries and no heat, but which actually can compute faster than today’s PCs.
That’s the idea behind two grants from the National Science Foundation and the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative to Virginia Commonwealth University. And if it’s successful, it should have a big impact on how semiconductors are designed in the future.
The idea is to actually replace transistors with nanomagnets to process digital information. The magnets being tested currently have a diameter of 100nm, which is rather large by digital chip standards. The question now is whether they can be manufactured cost-effectively.
There has been enormous interest in energy harvesting lately, particularly for such uses as implantable medical devices and for places where batteries are difficult to replace. Using magnets, at least in theory, can substantially reduce the amount of current leakage and the associated heat, which would be particularly useful for a variety of purposes, included stacked die.
Green Mail
Google issued a white paper comparing its Gmail using a cloud-based messaging service to running the same application on local servers—something that may have interesting implications for cloud-based EDA services.
According to the case study, a small business running its own servers actually generates about 100 times the amount of carbon dioxide as the same application run in a Google cloud, and even a large business using maximum efficiency generates more than 3 times as much as Google.
What’s interesting about this case study is that it may provide a solid comparison by which to measure other cloud providers against Google’s. Of course this has to be tempered with issues such as security, guaranteed server uptime, failover and network access, but Google has put some hard data on the line. It will be worth watching to see who else matches it, and whether it generates enough buzz to spur additional interest in cloud offerings of all sorts—even SoC debug tools.
–Ed Sperling
Tags: cloud, energy harvesting, Google, nanomagnets