DOE seeks input to increase energy efficiency of semiconductor applications 1,000-fold over next 20 years
19 August 2024
The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO) released a request for information (DE-FOA-0003426) to solicit feedback from stakeholders on the Energy Efficiency Scaling for Two Decades (EES2) Initiative and the draft EES2 Research and Development (R&D) Roadmap that accompanies this RFI.
The roadmap outlines the technology R&D needed to increase the energy efficiency of semiconductor applications 1,000-fold over the next twenty years.
Semiconductive materials, such as silicon, are used to construct vital components of industrial-scale data centers, smartphones, computers, solar cells, electric vehicles, and many other products that millions of Americans use daily. Over the last 30 years, energy efficiency improvements in the products made by the semiconductor industry have fallen out of pace with the surging global demand for computing and artificial intelligence technologies.
Since 2010, overall semiconductor application energy use has doubled every three years, and by 2030, if this rate of increase continues, the semiconductor industry could consume nearly 20% of global energy production. The EES2 National Initiative aims to put the semiconductor industry back on the path of doubling energy efficiency every two years to increase the economic competitiveness of American microelectronics manufacturers and to strengthen domestic clean energy supply chains.
AMMTO seeks input from industry, academia, research laboratories, government agencies, and other stakeholders on issues related to energy efficiency in the semiconductor industry, particularly for computing applications. Feedback on the initial version (1.0) of the roadmap that accompanies this RFI is of specific interest.
With this RFI, AMMTO seeks input on the following three categories:
EES2 initiative goals and objectives
Roadmap document
Process and future steps
Feedback will also be essential to the EES2 Initiative, which not only aims to enhance the semiconductor industry and its products’ energy efficiency, but also aims to fast-track the application of these technologies across different sectors and ensure rapid adaptation to ever-evolving market and environmental demands.
Tricky - it is not as if the semiconductor industry is not aware of this.
IMO< the problem is that they are finding it very hard to shrink the geometries by much, so what they do is add cores to increase parallelism, and hence size.
So as the transistor count increases by more than the transistor size decreases, the overall area and power consumption increases.
In addition, algorithms such is Bitcoin proof of work and AI are very power hungry.
+ with Bitcoin, if you make more efficient ASICs, the bar increases as everyone has to use the new Asics and your energy usage does not go down much.
I suppose the big worry now is enormously increased AI usage: however, IMO, they may be able to reduce the power consumption here with ASICs.
Posted by: mahonj | 19 August 2024 at 09:24 AM