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Energy-saving Minicomputers for the ‘Internet of Things’
The ‘Internet of Things’ is growing rapidly. Mobile phones, washing machines and the milk bottle in the fridge: the idea is that minicomputers connected to these will be able to process information, receive and send data. This requires electrical power. Transistors that are capable of switching information with a single electron use far less power than field effect transistors that are commonly used in computers. However, these innovative electronic switches do not yet work at room temperature. Scientists working on the new EU research project ‘Ions4Set’ intend to change this. The program will be launched on February 1. It is coordinated by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR).
“Billions of tiny computers will in future communicate with each other via the Internet or locally. Yet power consumption currently remains a great obstacle”, says project coordinator Dr. Johannes von Borany from the HZDR. “Basically, there are two options: either one improves the batteries or one develops computer chips that require significantly less energy.” [innovations-report.com]
For example, it has been known for years that single electron transistors are an energy-saving alternative to the commonly used field effect transistors (FET). As yet, however, they only work at low temperatures and, what is more, they are not compatible with the so-called CMOS technology that forms the technological basis for the integration of a huge number of FET components on a computer chip necessary to perform complex signal processing at laptops or smartphones.
The single electron transistor (SET) switches electricity by means of a single electron. The novel SET is based on a so-called quantum dot (consisting of just several hundred silicon atoms) embedded in an isolating layer that is sandwiched between two conducting layers.
Hard to imagine that practical SETs would not also find their way into every other application beyond the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and accelerate demand-destruction [slate.com].
