Smartphones, laptops and smartwatches consume vast
quantities of energy, yet only around half of this energy is
actually used to power important functions. And with billions of
these devices in use worldwide, a significant amount of energy goes
to waste. Professor Adrian Ionescu and his team at EPFL’s
Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory (Nanolab) have launched a series
of research projects in the quest to make transistors more
energy-efficient. “The transistor is the most abundant artificial
object ever created by humans,” says Prof. Ionescu. “It enables our
entire computational infrastructure and the way we interact in real
time with portable information processing in the 21st century. It
forms the basic building block for both digital and analog signal
processing.”
