Pushing Technology’s Thermodynamic Limits with ‘Momentum Computing’
Imagine your computer fan never having to cry for dear life keeping your computer cool. Physicist James Crutchfield of UC Davis and his graduate student Kyle Ray have proposed a new way to carry out computation that would dissipate only a small fraction of the heat produced by conventional circuits.
The catch is that, to avoid transferring any heat—that is, to be what physicists call an adiabatic process—the series of logical operations in the computation must usually be carried out infinitely slowly. In a sense, this approach avoids any “frictional heating” in the process but at the cost of taking infinitely long to complete the calculation.
It hardly seems a practical solution, then. “The conventional wisdom for a long time has been that the energy dissipation in reversible computing is proportional to speed,” says computer scientist Michael Frank of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
