Adiabatic Switching, Low Energy Computing, And The Physics Of Storing And Erasing Information

A new CMOS logic family allows the design of digital computing circuits that are more energy efJicient than conventional CMOS circuits, and that become increasingly energy efficient the slower they are operated. 7ke properties of the new logic family support Landauer’s thermodynamically motivated conjecture that the only necessarily dissipative opertion in compution is the erasure of information. Also, they suggest that there is an analogous result in switching theory, which bounds below the energy dissipation in circuits containing feedback. In this paper, we sketch the principles of the new logic family, and discuss some intuitive insights which might be useful in constructing a rigorous proof of a switching-theoretic analog of Landuaer’s principle.