Project Definition

Introduction

Despite ever improving computing efficiency, information technology (IT) still represents the fastest growing consumer of energy. Uncontrolled, this demand would have significant implications on the U.S. energy landscape. In parallel we are facing a possible end to Moore’s Law in the coming decade, which would either greatly accelerate the energy problem or significantly restrict U.S. computing growth severely threatening the nation’s ability to solve important problems in science and national security. Semiconductor technology clearly ha an essential role to play in future energy and technology security. In one example of projected IT energy growth: Cisco reports (Cisco Global Cloud Index, 2013–2018) that data center traffic (a useful metric for energy demand) is projected to grow at a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 23% from 2013-18. With no improvement in computing efficiency (i.e., the end of Moore’s Law), one would expect this growth to be directly reflected in increased energy demand going from 91 billion kilowatt-hours in 2013 to 252 billion kilowatt-hours in 2018. Just meeting this increased demand alone would require 60 new 500-megawatt power plants, and will likely be exacerbated by the end of conventional Moore’s Law technology scaling in the next decade.

The Purpose (Mission)

DOE has a unique opportunity to create a new Public-Private partnership for basic/applied research to accelerate the development of energy efficient IT beyond the end of current roadmaps as well as maintaining an advanced manufacturing base in the economically critical semiconductor space. This partnership will allow DOE to leverage significant industry investments with the goal of enabling low-power computing and suitably low cost smart grid and building electronics.

Solving the daunting energy challenge described above will require both manufacturing technology advances allowing the continuation of Moore’s Law from the device patterning perspective as well as groundbreaking advances in device technology going beyond CMOS, system architecture, and programming models to allow the energy benefits of scaling to be realized. Only with co-design covering this broad space and consideration of manufacturing challenges, can we expect to make progress in all areas cohesively to bring about real change to IT energy outlook. In addition to containing the growth of IT related energy demand, the output of this work will provide a path to sustaining exponential growth in computing capabilities to enable new scientific discoveries, and maintain U.S. competitiveness in all segments of the computing market (from IoT, to datacenters, to supercomputing).

Project Scope

To meet the goals of broad societal impact, we must ensure transition of basic research to high volume manufacturing and even more fundamentally shape basic research from the start with an eye to manufacturability. This will be achieved through the development of a multi-lab ecosystem serving as a facility that can evaluate and demonstrate the manufacturing and energy savings feasibility of next generation technology options. Technologies will be rigorously evaluated for potential benefits on energy and implications on architecture, programming paradigms. The most promising technologies will be evaluated for issues around high volume manufacturing followed by ramp-up demonstration and getting them to deliver on the energy promises. This phase will depend heavily on identifying specific manufacturing/device materials where we will leverage the capabilities of the Materials Project and current HPC capabilities to accelerate the development through modeling and “virtual cycles of learning”. Manufacturing feasibility would also include demonstration of whatever patterning technology would be needed to support the various technologies and scaling of those technologies. Delivering on this vision will require the integration of four major thrusts as follows:

  1. The devices and CMOS Technology thrust will explore, identify, model, and demonstrate the new materials and devices for ultra-efficient computing. Examples include low voltage transistor concepts such as the TFET, photonic devices, spintronics, and novel memory devices. The goal is to use Materials Project and HPC high-throughput search for new materials to increase throughput for discovering new electronic materials and devices by a factor of 1000x over current methods.
  2. The Advanced Manufacturing and Integration thrust would leverage DOE’s expertise in EUV lithography and materials to develop novel nanomanufacturing methods, including EUV lithography, heterogeneous integration of advanced photonics and wide bandgap devices, and 3D stacking, are increasing density enabling memory layers on top of logic layers, and even multiple memory and logic layers interleaved. This radical change challenges assumptions embedded in current architectures, and would provide a new dimension to extend Moore’s Law scaling.
  3. The Architecture thrust applies DOE expertise in advanced computing to exploit new device and materials systems and packaging technologies developed in the first two thrusts. Components include accelerators, on-chip wide-bandgap devices, photonic blocks, and emerging memory devices. The goal of these architectures is to remove overheads in current designs, as well as offer hardware and thus more efficient support for important functionality such as security and resiliency.
  4. The Programming models thrust seeks to create new paradigms integrated with the new systems that define how application designers interact with the machine. Existing programming models are designed with old architectures in mind. New programming models and runtimes are necessary that both expose the fundamental changes in relative costs of each operation, as well as break abstraction barriers such that the heterogeneity of future machines can be both exposed and exploited.

Objectives

Increase the energy efficiency of computing devices to match or exceed historical “Moore’s Law” rates of improvement.

Measurable Objectives:

  1. Within 10 years, we will invent new energy efficient electronics materials systems, devices, manufacturing systems, and architectures to continue exponential technology scaling of digital electronics performance and energy efficiency beyond 2035-2040.