Institute of Electrical Engineering, Director
Integrated Systems Laboratory, Professor
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

 

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Leveraging Emerging Technologies in Computing

 Monday, 10 October 2016 at 8:45

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Abstract:

The evolution of computing over the years has lead to very different realizations, ranging from portable electronics to supercomputing. At the same time, embedded computing permeates every day’s life, as demonstrated by the increasing presence of computing in vehicles (e.g., self-driving vehicles), in the workplace (from smart office to smart factory), to health care, and – last but not least – to the Internet of Things (IoT). There is an increasing demand of computational power as well as of reduced energy consumption, two competing factors that are not obvious to reconcile.  The current semiconductor technologies, mainly FinFETs and FDSoI, provide us with a robust physical means of addressing computing requirements, but a strong interest is placed now in how to enhance the current devices (in terms of performance and functionality) with new materials as well as how to use these materials to realize completely novel devices. Medium term enhancement of silicon technology includes tunnel FETs and NanoWire (NW) transistors, which both can address low-power solutions. Current realizations of Si NW transistors include both horizontal and vertical arrangements, the latter being very effective for increasing device density. Recent research has also shown the usefulness of Carbon NanoTubes (CNTs) in realizing simple but scalable computational engines, as well as 2-Dimensional materials, such and MoS₂ to realize transistors.  A different approach to increasing the computational effectiveness of transistors, as well as avoiding some variability problems, is electrostatic doping, i.e., the realization of transistors that can have electrically-programmable polarity. Such devices have been realized on various substrates, such as SiNW, CNTs and WSe₂ in experimental forms. Electrical programmability is achieved by a secondary gate, thus making the atomic computing element into a 4-terminal device. From a logic and architectural abstraction standpoint, these devices are switches activated by a comparison, thus semantically more powerful than regular transistors.  The mapping of computing structures on controllable-polarity substrates provides thus new challenges, and it has shown to be effective for arithmetic blocks where binate logic functions abound. Design algorithms, methods and tools, such as those based on majority algebra, are both important investigation and design means for these new technologies. Eventually, the evolution of semiconductor technology will bring us the fusion of sensors with computation, thus enabling new computing modalities and interaction with the physical environment. Namely, heterogeneous integration can be exemplified by the biological functionalization of Si NWs, that can make them into miniaturized and effective biosensors for medical and environmental needs. Broadly speaking, geometry downscaling, material hybridization and multi-layer integration are the ingredients for more diverse and powerful computing paradigms in the years to come.

About the speaker:

Giovanni De Micheli is Professor and Director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering and of the Integrated Systems Centre at EPF Lausanne, Switzerland. He is program leader of the Nano-Tera.ch program. Previously, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He holds a Nuclear Engineer degree (Politecnico di Milano, 1979), a M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (University of California at Berkeley, 1980 and 1983).

Prof. De Micheli is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE and a member of the Academia Europaea. His research interests include several aspects of design technologies for integrated circuits and systems, such as synthesis for emerging technologies, networks on chips and 3D integration. He is also interested in heterogeneous platform design including electrical components and biosensors, as well as in data processing of biomedical information. He is author of: Synthesis and Optimization of Digital Circuits, McGraw-Hill, 1994, co-author and/or co-editor of eight other books and of over 600 technical articles. His citation h-index is 85 according to Google Scholar. He is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of IMEC (Leuven, B), CfAED (Dresden, D) and STMicroelectronics.

Prof. De Micheli is the recipient of the 2012 IEEE/CAS Mac Van Valkenburg award for contributions to theory, practice and experimentation in design methods and tools and of the 2003 IEEE Emanuel Piore Award for contributions to computer-aided synthesis of digital systems. He received also the Golden Jubilee Medal for outstanding contributions to the IEEE CAS Society in 2000, the D. Pederson Award for the best paper on the IEEE Transactions on CAD/ICAS in 1987, and several Best Paper Awards, including DAC (1983 and 1993), DATE (2005) and Nanoarch (2010 and 2012).

He has been serving IEEE in several capacities, namely: Division 1 Director (2008-9), co-founder and President Elect of the IEEE Council on EDA (2005-7), President of the IEEE CAS Society (2003), Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on CAD/ICAS (1997-2001). He has been Chair of several conferences, including Memocode (2014) DATE (2010), pHealth (2006), VLSI SOC (2006), DAC (2000) and ICCD (1989).