In a major engineering step, engineers have created a new circuit that combines two integral parts of a computer chip, with the potential to revolutionize everything from IoT devices to data centers. The new chips are created with a new 2D material that helps the chips combine logic operations and memory functions, thus saving considerable amounts of power. The development is courtesy of researchers from the Swiss research institute École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). At EPFL's Laboratory for Electronics and Nanoscale Structures (LANES), researchers used a new 2D material to combine computing and storage.
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Speaking of the benefits of the new chip, Andras Kis, director of LANES, says that the new chip "opens the door to smaller, more powerful, and more energy-efficient devices." The power efficiency of computer chips is governed by the von Neumann architecture, which essentially requires separate processing and storage units. The constant exchange of data between the two drives ends up consuming considerable amounts of energy and time. Researchers have long worked to overcome this limitation, but have been limited due to the lack of availability of suitable engineering hardware. The limitation was overcome with a relatively new 2D material called MoS2, so named because it consists of a single, two-dimensional layer three atoms thick. After studying the suitability of this new material, EPFL researchers used it to fabricate the new chips based on their revolutionary new logic-in-memory architecture. The researchers say these chips will help develop dedicated, energy-efficient hardware, especially for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. However, since the new chips will help create faster and more power-efficient processors, the new development will also be useful in a variety of other large-scale computing applications.