Title: Quest for Energy Efficiency in Computing Technologies

Speaker: Sayeef Salahuddin, UC Berkeley

Abstract:
As computing becomes increasingly pervasive in our daily life, it is generally recognized that energy efficiency will be one of the key design considerations for any future computing scheme. Consequently, significant research is currently ongoing on exploring new physics, material systems and system level designs to improve energy efficiency. In this talk, I shall discuss some of our recent progresses in this regard. Specifically, the physics of ordered and correlated systems allow for fundamental improvement of the energy efficiency when a transition happens between two distinguishable states. Our recent experiments show that this theoretical promise can indeed be realized in electronic devices. The resulting gain in energy efficiency could exceed orders of magnitude.

Biography:
S. Salahuddin is an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California Berkeley. His work has focused mostly on conceptualization and exploration of novel device physics for low power electronic and spintronic devices. Salahuddin has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the US Government on early career scientist and engineers. Salahuddin also received a number of other awards including the NSF CAREER award, the IEEE Nanotechnology Early Career Award, the Young Investigator Awards from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and the Army Research Office (ARO) and best paper awards from IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems and from the VLSI-TSA conference. In 2012, Applied Physics Letters (APL) highlighted two of his papers among 50 most notable papers among all areas published in APL within 2009-2012. At Berkeley, Salahuddin is a co-director of the Berkeley Device Modeling Center and Berkeley Center for Negative Capacitance Transistors. He is on the editorial board of IEEE Electron Devices Letters and currently chairs the IEEE Electron Devices Society committee on Nanotechnology.