By Hannah Grover
As computerization and artificial intelligence become more ubiquitous in everyday life, more energy is needed to power those processes.
Research institutions like Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are teaming up to find ways of making computing more energy and resource efficient — and better able to withstand extreme environments.
The U.S. Department of Energy used $179 million in funding from the Micro Act, under the Joe Biden Administration, to create three microelectronics research centers that host a variety of projects, including making computing more energy efficient. These centers are seeking answers to some of the pressing questions facing our society as it becomes increasingly computerized.
Sandia and LANL are involved in projects at two of those centers and Sandia co-founded one.
“We’re digitizing our entire world,” Sandia’s Jeffrey Nelson, the director of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), said. CINT is a joint effort between Sandia and LANL. “Everything has a computer chip in it.”
It’s no longer just objects such as cell phones, Nelson said.
“Now even our refrigerators and toasters are saying they have chips,” he said.
That increasing use of computer technology means that the demand for electricity to power the objects is also increasing.
On top of all that, artificial intelligence is becoming commonplace,
“All of the demands on the energy system will just increase as AI is proliferated in our society,” Nelson said.
Researchers have found that, in some instances, materials such as molybdenum disulfide, gallium arsenide and diamond may be better options than silicon for certain types of computing. “What we’ve been trying to do is think about new material options that will help reduce those energy demands,” Nelson said.
He said materials with low resistance may be good for electronic applications while materials like gallium arsenide are well suited for communications.
“The idea is really to try to integrate and bring these materials together in a very intimate way …that can really help reduce some of the energy demands, we hope, and give these large companies other options for new materials and devices,” he said.
The funding from the Department of Energy and the coordination with other labs and research institutions will help take that research to the next level.
There is also a demand for computer chips in more extreme environments, such as areas with high radiation or with ultra low temperatures.
Jennifer Ann Hollingsworth, who works for LANL in the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) in the Materials Physics and Applications division, said those extreme environments can include outer space, nuclear energy, nuclear security and even military operations.
“Electronics that are built for certain applications or certain industries are not necessarily up to the task for those harsh environments,” she said.
LANL’s project, as well as the three other projects in the center, is focused on ways to “mitigate those effects from the ground up,” Hollingsworth said.
She said that means making the building block materials more resilient to effects of radiation and finding ways to allow the components to function in harsh environments reliably over longer periods of time.
The project builds upon work that LANL has been doing both in CINT and in the chemistry division in the field of nanoscale semiconductors, which are also known as quantum dots.
Nelson said these projects will lead to a lot of new materials, devices and technologies.
“Having not only CINT but the two national laboratories working as part of these larger centers and individual projects will highlight opportunities for economic development in New Mexico, by making the both the research and investment community aware of these innovations, and hopefully there’ll be some potential spin out opportunities or companies coming here to take advantage of the innovations within these projects,” Nelson said.