Symposium EN15: Materials Research Opportunities for Energy Efficient Computing

With the explosion of data and processing required to turn that data into useful information, there is an unprecedented need for energy efficient computation. In the last decade, the rate at which data was generated outpaced improvements in compute efficiency, leading to high energy consumption. For perspective, data centers consume 200 TWh+ each year which exceeds the total energy consumption of some entire countries. Expanded use of the Internet, smart phones, and more sophisticated computation is causing all of those numbers to escalate. Making computation more energy-efficient would reduce computation cost, energy consumption, and enable batteries to run longer or be smaller for mobile computing. There has been a collective effort among academia, industry, and government to explore multi-faceted approaches for advancing low energy computing. Making computation more energy-efficient would save money, reduce energy use, and permit batteries that provide power in mobile devices to run longer and/or be smaller.

Materials are the building blocks of the compute hardware stack. Starting at the smallest scale, there are switching elements that comprise logic and/or memory. These elements are put together at the package level with passives, thermal management solutions, and interconnects to form the integrated chip. As materials touch every one of these components, the goal of this Symposium is to focus on the materials challenges and opportunities that will accelerate solutions for energy efficient computation. There is already a substantial body of knowledge in this field spanning multiple approaches. The Symposium Co- Organizers have decided to focus specifically on the important areas described below.

Topics will include:

Fundamental limits for computation driving materials solutions
Charge based energy efficient devices
Non-charge based energy efficient devices
Future low energy memory solutions
Low energy interconnects
Efficient thermal management materials solutions
Microelectronic packaging (advanced solutions with materials emphasis only)
Neuromorphic computing (with materials thrust)

Invited Speakers:

Jeong-Hoon Ahn (Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Republic of Korea)
Inge Asselberghs (imec, Belgium)
Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
Zhilhong Cheng (Purdue University, USA)
Judith Driscoll (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)
Sauray Dutta (University of Notre Dame, USA)
Ru Huang (Peking University, China)
Daniele Ielmini (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Jean Anne Incorvia (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
Xiuling Li (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
Matthieu Luisier (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
Matt Marinella (Sandia National Laboratories, USA)
Ramamoorthy Ramesh (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Heike Riel (IBM, USA)
Tania Roy (University of Central Florida, USA)
Uwe Schröder (NaMLab gGmbH, Germany)
Aida Todri-Sanial (Laboratoire d’Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier, France)
Chris van de Walle (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Jian-Ping Wang (University of Minnesota, USA)
H.-S. Philip Wong (Stanford University, USA)
Victor Zhirnov (Semiconductor Research Corporation, USA)