Electronics and the environment: Five technologies to watch

Today, electronics is also being exploited for the accomplishment of a goal that was not a concern in the industry’s formative years but that has implications for the future of the planet: reducing power consumption. Specifically, the aim is a reduction in society’s reliance on fossil fuels, such as oil and coal, for generating electric power, thereby reducing the CO2 emissions that many scientists have fingered as a prime culprit in climate change.

The relationship between the evolution of electronics and power efficiency follows a trend line that predates and is steeper than Moore’s Law. Today’s average laptop, for example, is massively more energy-efficient than the vacuum-tube computers of the 1950s as measured by computations per kilowatt-hour. Project this trend out a decade, and some believe we’ll have laptops that run on ambient light and never need to be plugged in.

Here, we take a look at five electronics technologies that are playing a high-profile role in this power revolution. The list is not a ranking, nor is it definitive; rather, is it a collection of innovations that together will make a difference for the planet. [EE Times thanks our reader community for responding online to our call for suggested topics. — Ed.]

The transistor: Going 3-D

Imagine for a moment that the solid-state revolution had never occurred and we were still living in a world of vacuum-tube computing. Not only would our laptops be much bigger (think, four-bedroom house), but they would require significantly more electricity to perform the same operation—about a trillion times more.

From the vacuum-tube ENIAC era of the ’40s and ’50s to the present, computations per kilowatt-hour have doubled every 1.6 years, according to Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford University and co-author of a 2009 paper that details the relationship between computers’ energy use and their performance.

According to Koomey’s research, ENIAC operated at less than 1 kiloflops (103 floating-point operations/second) per kilowatt-hour, while today’s laptops can theoretically operate at 1 petaflops (1015 flops)/kWh.


Computations per kilowatt-hour As computers pack more computational power, the energy needed to perform a particular calculation decreases rapidlyÑa trend that predates MooreÕs Law. TodayÕs laptops are 1 trillion times more energy-efficient than the vacuum tube computers of the Õ40s.


Thanks to Intel’s announcement in early May that it was commercializing its three-dimensional “trigate” transistor in a 22-nm microprocessor, the continuation of Moore’s Law and Koomey’s trend line for computations/kWh is assured for at least a few more years. That’s because the novel fin architecture of the trigate transistor consumes less than half the power at the same performance level as a 2-D planar transistor on a 32-nm chip, according to Intel. Smaller, faster, cheaper … and dramatically more power efficient.

Extrapolating the power/performance trend line out a few years, Koomey believes it will have profound implications for the evolution of mobile computing and, in particular, the prospects for harnessing the information-gathering potential of wireless sensor networks.

That’s not all. As the number of data centers continues to rise, the operations they run will become that much more energy-efficient. Today, the world’s data centers account for about 1 percent of total electric energy consumed. Theoretically, all things being equal, a doubling of the number of data centers that use 3-D transistor IC architectures would have a negligible impact on the total energy requirement, while operating at much higher performance levels.

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