Energy efficiency is the common denominator in the challenges of improving quality of life and reducing environmental impact through the diffusion of low-cost electronic systems whose usage does not interfere with their surroundings (spatially thanks to their extreme compactness, temporally thanks to their energy autonomy).We believe that dramatic improvements energy efficiency can be obtained through few fundamental principles, which we explore in many different ways:
- electronics is going towards increasingly complex systems: meaningful circuit solutions need to fit a system concept first
- energy efficiency comes from synergy: working cooperatively across levels of abstraction leads to benefits that are largely greater than the sum of the single benefits
- energy is a valuable currency, and needs to be continuously traded off with other available commodities (performance/data rate, error rate/signal quality, resolution…)
- energy needs to be truly scalable across voltage and time-varying specifications: every time we can give up something, energy needs to benefit from it
- emerging technologies are a tremendous source of inspiration to look at the future, and to learn new ways to use what exists
- understanding or at least measuring are powerful tools to increase energy efficiency by avoiding pessimism and reducing design margin
- intelligence and data sensemaking need to be widely distributed, as the current cloud-based computing prohibits too many interesting applications due to the large cost of wireless communication
- failures are part of our life, as well as of electronics systems: dealing with them nicely is certainly more effective than just ignoring or pessimistically budgeting for them.
The above general principles inspire our thinking and are being extensively applied in our research to come up with creative solutions to the challenge of improving energy efficiency by the next 10X (one 10X at a time).