It’s the manufacturing, stupid!

We use a lot of energy due to the widespread use of chips in various devices. Chips are basically everywhere except in toilet paper (although that may be an interesting idea). Together, these chips use significant energy, leading to a strong effort to reduce this power consumption. We want our batteries to last longer and our cloud servers not to suck up all our green energy. Thanks to Moore’s Law, on-chip features got smaller and distances shorter, so the energy per digital function exponentially decreased since the 1970s.

However, it’s predicted that this decrease in power consumption will soon level off. This means designing low-power chips, especially large digital chips, will become a challenge. One major obstacle in reducing power consumption is the interface between the processor and memory. Solutions like in-memory computing are therefore being explored.