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A continuing theme in many of the conferences I’ve attended this 12 months: on this age of AI in nearly every thing, semiconductor applied sciences should allow us to do increasingly computing whereas preserving vitality consumption the identical or decrease. In different phrases, do extra with much less.
This was evident at this week’s Leti Innovation Days 2023 convention in Grenoble, France, the annual occasion the place analysis group CEA-Leti showcases the superior applied sciences and analysis it has been engaged on, each by means of its personal researchers and with companions like GlobalFoundries, Soitec and STMicroelectronics.
In an unique video interview with EE Instances (click on on the video above), CEA-Leti CEO Sebastien Dauvé underlines the sustainability message being important in any new know-how and product growth. He highlights why we have to rethink laptop architectures going ahead in a more-than-Moore period of heterogenous and 3D-stacked programs, think about issues like compute-in-memory, and ship innovation that reduces vitality use within the processing of lots of information.
This was echoed by different audio system on the convention. Agnieszka Thonet, distinguished technologist for HP Expertise Technique, mentioned machine-generated knowledge will attain important ranges of scale, and that requires a systemic strategy to serving to cut back the lifetime vitality footprint of merchandise, from cradle to gate to grave and again to cradle.
“AI is driving the re-invention of laptop architectures,” Thonet mentioned.
Stellantis CEO Ned Curic mentioned in his discuss that we should do extra with much less because the automotive trade places increasingly compute into autos, which have gotten more and more related and autonomous.
Frederic Godemel, EVP at Schneider Electrical, mentioned that the semiconductor trade additionally wanted to have a look at its vitality use. “The world wants each extra and fewer vitality,” he mentioned, referring to the necessity for extra vitality for extra AI however much less vitality to ship what the world wants. “How we eat vitality [today] is unsustainable.”
He cited an instance the place, if we double the manufacturing of chips, the vitality used to supply them is akin to doubling the vitality utilized by a rustic like Portugal.
Soitec CEO Pierre Barnabe additionally highlighted how his firm was striving to drive the transition towards sustainability with its personal innovation and operations, by lowering the environmental footprint throughout the life cycle of its merchandise, and discount of water consumption by accountable water administration for its operations.
The moonshot of our period: local weather change
The sustainability message echoes the theme of imec’s ITF World Summit in Antwerp, Belgium, simply over a month in the past. In his opening keynote, imec CEO Luc Van den hove mentioned the world is going through a poly-crisis, which incorporates the geopolitical dimension however extra considerably with regard to vitality, too.
“There isn’t a debate concerning the moonshot of our period: its local weather change,” Van de hove mentioned. “Semiconductors will function the flywheel towards the transformation to a sustainable society.”
He added that this can require optimization of laptop architectures, and growth of programs that construct upon the cross-pollination between sciences, sectors and industries. That is crucial on condition that compute wants for AI are exploding. Particularly, he mentioned that generative AI was the fashionable massive bang, and in consequence, {hardware} and software program should be co-developed in an agile and optimized method.
Van den hove famous methodologies like 2D/3D stacking might present an energy-efficient strategy to scaling past Moore’s Legislation, and a revamp of semiconductor manufacturing processes wanted to be part of the sustainable system puzzle. “Doing nothing isn’t an choice,” he mentioned. “A holistic strategy throughout the semiconductor ecosystem is required.”
At ITF World in Belgium, Mark Papermaster, CTO and EVP for know-how and engineering at AMD, repeated his message from his keynote finally 12 months’s Design Automation Convention (DAC) in San Francisco: the explosion in computing wants is at an inflection level, and the important thing grand problem for the trade is vitality.
At each conferences—Leti Innovation Days and ITF World—it was clear that the main European analysis and know-how organizations had been deeply centered on delivering improvements to assist cut back carbon footprints ensuing from each the explosion in compute on account of the expansion in AI and generative AI, and the semiconductor trade itself because it strives to ship the chips that allow extra compute and smarter applied sciences.
In different phrases, they’re centered on how you can allow and ship sustainable high-performance computing for the period of AI and related clever gadgets.
