Wei-Sheng Zhao

Guest Editorial Special Section on the Energy-Efficient Technologies

Wei-Sheng Zhao

In the past few years, energy-efficient technologies get more and more scientific and technological interest as the energy bottleneck stops the “Moore’s law” according to the reports of International Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). Moreover, people start to take care seriously of the environmental impact due to the power dissipation.1

There are principally two power issues. First, the intrinsic leakage currents of semiconductor lead to high static power, which represents nearly 10% of total domestic power consumption and it is dissipated for nothing. Researchers from IBM estimated that this dissipation in USA represents the power generation of two nuclear plants in 2010. It limits particularly the standby duration of battery-powered electronics like mobile phones and electrical cars. Second, the data traffic between the high-density main memory and complex computing units becomes more and more significant, which dominates now the whole power consumption of modern integrated circuits and the efficiency of this power dissipation is very low. It is important to note that these two issues become worse with the minimization of transistor size. Thereby, electronics should find a new way to improve the performance instead of scaling down.

The objective of this Special Section is to present research and development activities that are currently taking place in various aspects of energy-efficient technologies and solutions by over viewing the recent results. It is expected that this Special Section will encourage readers to become even more interested and involved in this promising research area for our future green consummation life. After a very careful review of many highly qualified submissions, the editorial committee accepted 2 papers for inclusion in this Special Section.

In order to benefit at most energy-efficient technologies, we need to combine the emerging device beyond semiconductor and the integration paradigms different from the von Neumann architecture. The new devices could relieve the leakage current issues but not fit for the data traffic; new computing paradigms were intensively studied in the last half-century but they need the support of devices with special characteristics. The paper: Low Power Computing Paradigms Based on Emerging Non-Volatile Nano-Devices proposed by the groups of University of Paris-Sud 11 and Beihang University presents the potential solutions for this purpose. For instance, the integration of bio-inspired neuromorphic computing mode and memristor devices can overcome significantly the power issue while increasing the performance. The using of non-volatile memory devices can also revolutionize the current reconfigurable logic gates in terms of power and speed. They can become the key enable technology to rebalance the market between the application specific and generic electronics.

Following the rapid progress of battery-powered electronics in the last years, the “normally off” electronics are widely considered to be the mainstream solution in the near future. However, the hardware implementation to realize them is still under intense research and development. Non-volatile flip-flops could become the key element to bring the non-volatilty into the computing core and allow the real instant on-off operation. All the low power electronics large companies have research projects on this basic element due to its capability to overcome definitely the power dissipation issue. The invited paper: An Overview of Non Volatile Flip-Flops Based on Emerging Memory Technologies proposed by the groups of Aix-Marseille University and University of Paris-Sud 11 presents an overview of this element based on different technologies.

In order to realize the green life and society, power-efficient technologies should be always the major research topics for the scientists and engineers. We will continue to propose the special sessions on this topics covering from energy generation to transportation, from energy distribution to storage, from semiconductor processing to communications, and from portable devices to data centers.

On behalf of the editorial committee, we express our sincere thanks to all authors and reviewers for their great contribution to this Special Section. Also, we thank the editorial committee members for their excellent assistance. Finally, we are grateful to the editorial staff for their help. Without all of the contributions of these hard-working, dedicated people, it would have been impossible to produce this special issue.

Wei-Sheng Zhao,Guest Editor

Beihang University, Beijing, China

University of Paris-Sud 11,Orsay, France

Wei-Sheng Zhaowas born in China in 1980. He received the Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Paris-Sud 11, France in 2007. From 2004 to 2008, he investigated spintronic logic circuits and designed prototypes for hybrid spintronic/CMOS chips in cooperation with STMicroelectronics and French Atomic

Agency (CEA).

From

2009 to 2014, he led tenured CNRS research scientist and his interests include the hybrid integration of nano-devices with CMOS circuits and new non-volatile memories (40 nm technology node and below) like MRAM circuits and architecture design. Since 2014, he has been a professor at Beihang University and leads spintronics research programs. Dr. Zhao has authored or co-authored more than 100 scientific papers (e.g. Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Nanotechnology, APL, and IEEE/ACM Transactions) and he is a senior member of IEEE.

Digital Object Identifier: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-862X.2014.02.005