Experimental test of Landauer's principle in single-bit operations on nanomagnetic memory bits.

ABSTRACT: Minimizing energy dissipation has emerged as the key challenge in continuing to scale the performance of digital computers. The question of whether there exists a fundamental lower limit to the energy required for digital operations is therefore of great interest. A well-known theoretical result put forward by Landauer states that any irreversible single-bit operation on a physical memory element in contact with a heat bath at a temperature T requires at least k B T ln(2) of heat be dissipated from the memory into the environment, where k B is the Boltzmann constant. We report an experimental investigation of the intrinsic energy loss of an adiabatic single-bit reset operation using nanoscale magnetic memory bits, by far the most ubiquitous digital storage technology in use today. Through

SUBMITTER: Hong J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4795654 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature