The Cost of Energy-Efficiency in Digital Hardware: The Trade-Off between Energy Dissipation, Energy-Delay Product and Reliability in Electronic, Magnetic and Optical Binary Switches

Featured Application This work has applications in the benchmarking of binary switches for energy-efficient nanoelectronics. Binary switches, which are the primitive units of all digital computing and information processing hardware, are usually benchmarked on the basis of their 'energy-delay product', which is the product of the energy dissipated in completing the switching action and the time it takes to complete that action. The lower the energy-delay product, the better the switch (supposedly). This approach ignores the fact that lower energy dissipation and faster switching usually come at the cost of poorer reliability (i.e., a higher switching error rate) and hence the energy-delay product alone cannot be a good metric for benchmarking switches. Here, we show the trade-off between energy dissipation, energy-delay product and error-probability for an electronic switch (a metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor), a magnetic switch (a magnetic tunnel junction switched with spin transfer torque) and an optical switch (bistable non-linear mirror). As expected, reducing energy dissipation and/or energy-delay product generally results in increased switching error probability and reduced reliability.

Automated summary

This study examines the trade-off between energy dissipation, energy-delay product, and switching error probability in energy-efficient nanoelectronics, showing that reducing energy consumption and speeding up switching generally result in higher error probability and reduced reliability.