sophisticated electronic devices such as
computers and mobile phones forming part
of our daily life
these devices are simply amazing and
have revolutionized the way humans work
make use of the free time and interact
with each other
this radical transformation has been
possible just in a few decades thanks to
the combined effort or scientists and
engineers however as in any revolution
in human history we should ask ourselves
where we’re really really ready for all
these changes and other negative
consequences that we should identify and
try to fix this question will bring to
your minds different ideas there are for
instance security issues associated to
how electronic data are handled just
think about the hacking scandal in the
last US elections philosophical and
ethical issues since an education so
dominated by technology might not be the
best way to bring up our children and in
general if the great dependence that we
have today on these electronic devices
makes us really a stronger more
developed society there is an additional
drawback in this story that I haven’t
mentioned yet which is actually the one
motivating my own research which is the
increasing concern associated to the
total power consumption of computing
devices worldwide and its implication
for the environment
the information technology revolution
has been possible thanks to the
miniaturization of integrated circuits
an integrated circuit is the electronic
circuit forming part of a computer it is
called integrated because the electronic
components such as transistors are
directly fabricated on the silicon chip
that’s why they can be made extremely
it’s extremely small with billions of
them occupying a very small area that’s
why we have now at the same time really
light but powerful devices however a
higher processing power implies a larger
power consumption still these devices
such as mobile phones consume less
energy than many appliances at home
however its number is increasing rapidly
throughout the world because a human’s
hunger for technology is currently
aimless and in order to illustrate how
important this problem is today let’s
take a look at the big data centers so
these data centers such as Google
Facebook etc deal with a huge amount of
information coming from the web and
social media the thousands of thousands
of computing units in the data centers
create a lot of heat that’s why these
data centers are normally located in
cold areas of the planet and they’ll
require the eye Ganic cooling
infrastructures in fact according to
some sources if we imagine all data
centers forming a single country this
country would be the fifth on the list
of countries that consume more energy in
the world and is really frightening
figure is just going to get worse it is
therefore of vital importance to create
new technologies that are greener that
are not based on completely different
mechanisms and many researchers
worldwide are investigating different
approaches in my case I use
nanotechnology and magnet
nanotechnology is the area of technology
that deals with objects at the nano
scale which is usually defined to be
between 1 and 100 nanometers in order to
have an intuitive idea of what this
scale really means let’s take a look at
this ruler and I would like you to pay
attention to the 1 millimeter scale now
imagine dividing that the scale 1,000
times one of these units could be a
micron which is of the same scale and as
cells and bacteria
now imagine dividing 1 micron 1/4
sometimes more that is a nanometer so
you can imagine how small it is so
silicon transistors forming part of
integrated circuits are already
nanometric their electrical charge is
used to store bits of information in in
such memories it’s necessary to apply a
continuous supply of energy in order to
keep those bits in memory and not being
erased over time moreover every time
there is a computation bits need to be
transferred from the memory to the
processing unit or CPU going back to
memory once the computation has been
performed so as you can see current
computing architectures could be more
efficient if no continuous supply of
energy was required to keep those memory
those bits in memory and if memory and
CPU were merged together but as you can
see for that we need a completely new
padding for computation that’s why my
colleagues and I at the University of
Cambridge are investigating the
possibility of using magnetic nano
structures for green computation in
particular we are focusing our attention
on magnetic nano wires a nano wire is a
standard wire but has diameters at the
nano scale
and has several microns long because of
its very elongated shape it can store
multiple beats along its length which
move as tiny confined packages when
small pulses of current are applied
across the wires because they are made
of magnetic materials they don’t need a
continuous supply of energy in order to
keep those bits in memory and they are
not only great to store and move this
data but they can also perform
computations this is achieved by
modifying the shape of these wires and
by connecting them to others in
particular configurations many
scientists have been investigating the
properties of magnetic nano wires for
more than a decade now discovering
fascinating properties now in order to
make integrated circuits based on these
nano wires feasible technology we need
that those integrated circuits have
higher storage capacities and for that
we need an additional radical change
which is creating for the first time
three-dimensional chips because any chip
that has been ever fabricated is
essentially two-dimensional with a plane
of transistors and interconnectors
forming just a single plane the plane of
the chip this is due to a fundamental
bottleneck in manufacturing which is
that current nano fabrication methods
used by the microelectronic industry are
really great to create complex to the
Nano structures but they struggle so far
to make three-dimensional nano
structures my group in Cambridge
together with collaborators in other
groups in the US and one here in
Zaragoza Spain is investigating the
possibility of using electron
microscopes for 3d nano fabrication an
electron microscope is one of the most
versatile tools in nanotechnology
instead of using conventional light it
uses electrons in order to image objects
at the nano scale in great detail in our
case we combine these processes with
gases and in order to use these
microscopes as 3d nano printers so the
images that you can see here on the
screen have been created with this
technique and have features about 1,000
times smaller than what the best 3d
printer in the market can do today
this technique is still only feasible
for prototyping and we will need to make
this processes faster and cheaper in
order to to make it compatible with mass
massive production our group is
investigating if the properties of these
nanowires have the the necessary
characteristics for green computation
and in particular we face several
important challenges the first one is
that we need to make these the materials
made of these nanowires better in order
to achieve a smooth flow of data
moreover most nanotechnology methods
that have been created are designed to
probe two-dimensional nano structures in
our case in our lab we are doing
modifications and creating new
techniques in order to be able to probe
the magnetic properties of these
three-dimensional nano structures for
the first time to conclude I find really
exciting that we are getting closer to
having in our hands devices that are
based on circuits that are greener and
have noble functionalities this will
make possible these devices to be less
dependent on energy sources becoming
less of a concern for the environment of
the planet in order to achieve this I
would like to plead for a society that
is aware of the challenges of the future
a society that supports research and
innovation in order to advance and
overcome these challenges and that makes
a responsible use of technology today in
order that next generations can enjoy
our now technological world thank you
very much you