Power of electronics and peoples will

have you taken a photo lately

maybe you took it a few minutes ago

maybe earlier today

or yesterday maybe you have uploaded

into a social media platform

maybe facebook well little did you know

where it is actually stored

physically stored it’ll be in a place

like this

in clooney ireland or

in lulia sweden which are the two main

data centers

of facebook here in europe

what are data centers well

there are these warehouses very big

warehouses

with electronic racks row up and row

and they store all our data they are the

most powerful

industry now where information is the

most

valuable thing

and what is the energy consumption of

these data centers

of storing our data processing our data

and we gonna have even more abundance of

data

in the presence or in the upcoming of 5g

communication

what is 5g well it’s beyond 3 and 4g

in 3g i would communicate with you with

a via a machine or an electronic device

in 5g machines will communicate with

machines

everything will be connected it will be

this web

of communication everything will be

smart

smart city smart building smart health

care

smart everything and there is more data

that will be

in abundance a tsunami of data

where is all these data going to be

stored

what is the power or the energy of this

data

and what we can do with all these data

how we can process this data

now let’s look a little bit of data use

over the last year

and also the impact of covid

we have up to 70 percent of more mobile

phone users or smartphone users

everything is growing even in terms of

laptops

computers streaming we all like netflix

i guess

it’s an amazing an abundance of

frightening even

amount of data that we are consuming but

also generating

look at this snapshot here what’s

happening every 60 seconds on the

internet

there are hundreds and thousands of zoom

meetings netflix streams

instagrams tweets and by the time i

finish this talk

would be hundreds of millions of dollars

used on the internet

alarming it’s just the beginning

now we reached in 2017 1.1

zettabytes of data use

this is unprecedented by

2022 there will be 4.2 zettabytes if you

didn’t know what a zettabyte is

it has 21 zeros behind it

now internet it’s bigger in terms of

energy consumption

than a country like japan or or even

switzerland

now we’ll see even more of that

look into the projections here and what

the studies show

by 2030 the electronic industry

will be consuming 21 of the electricity

so that means one-fifth of the earth’s

global power

it will be on our electronic devices and

powering data centers

in terms of copper emission that’s about

14

making it globally the most polluting

and power hungry industry

it’s not going to be aviation it’s not

going to be our cars

it’s going to be our electronics things

we use

day to day now these are frightening

alarming bringing awareness maybe you

name it

but they are there now look a little bit

about their lifetime

at best maybe we use three to five years

our devices 18 percent of electronic

waste

is recycled 18. 82

end up in landfill in mountains of

electronics

now look a little bit of this chart here

showing what has happened to the

electronic waste and which countries

produced the most of course china is up

there

united states japan some european

countries

look into the far right kilogram per

capita

well friends is actually up there on top

five contenders

we don’t recycle much we like to use

them we don’t recycle much

so the electronic industry is really

revolutionizing our lives the way we

work

the way we entertain where we live how

communicate one another

but what’s the impact of all this

industry in our environment

why do electronics consume so much power

can we do something about it well that

has been my quest

i have a phd in computer engineering

from uc santa barbara and my phd was

how we can actually optimize or reduce

the power of microprocessors

which is the building block of an

electronic system

even my after my phd i felt like there

is

so much to do into how we can actually

reduce the power of electronic system

i felt i was just at the start of it so

i moved from u.s

to france i joined cnrs

and together with my team i kept on

looking at this problem is

can we build energy efficient

electronics

where is the power consumption going

can we do better and we strip down the

problem we looked at it at the system

level

architectural level circuit all the way

to transistor and even the materials

they are made of

we found out that there are some

materials such

as carbon nanotubes here

and 2d materials that indeed have

excellent physical properties they

switch faster

and their also are ultra low power and

they are very compact they are atomic

thin

so we can do amazing things with them

and we are currently exploring to build

a technology

in this materials but still

we need to go beyond the way we

classically compute

so in physics there is a theoretical

limit about how you

how much energy you need to compute or

to even compare

between two physical states like a zero

and a one

but our classical machines are way

beyond this computing limit

so we needed to figure out we need to

find a better way we need to think

how we design or how the computing is

done

and the inspiration came from nature

more specifically from the brain

now look at this little image here you

can see that neurons are firing with

neurons in a web of connected via

synapses

this is how we actually learn how we

memorize

this is how our brain builds plasticity

as we grow

our new connections between neurons to

neurons via this synapses

and the brain is a very powerful

computing

machine if you want to call it that way

it consumes about

20 to 25 watts which is less than

a lamp and it’s very efficient in

computing a lot of tasks

so can we design electronic system in a

similar way

like the brain or what we call it brain

inspired

design so i am part of a community

that is looking into ultra low power

brain inspired electronics so one side

you have the biological neuron and

synapses

and on the other side you have the

electronic neurons and synapses that we

are developing

using these nanomaterials in order to

emulate

the biological neural networks for

example like these circles here

connected with other circles

like neurons connecting with other

neurons via synapses to build this

web of connectivity things that you can

compute

much faster and consuming variable

trello power

that can be deployed in your next

electronics

this will change this would be a

paradigm change on how we actually

compute and how the electronics would

look like

and this is also in the framework of a

european project that i’m actually

working with many academics and industry

from industry

as well to bring this technology so it’s

deployed

so we make a change in terms of energy

efficiency

and power consumption of our electronic

devices

so we as scientists feel like this is a

turning point

we need to make the technology

environmental friendly we not

we cannot keep on going like nothing

matters

this is an this is an important point

for us a turning point for a whole

community

and i’m happy to hear from the state of

the union from european commission

the statement that made that we need to

reduce the comm the emissions by 55

percent by 2030.

now that doesn’t sound like much but

it’s a big step

toward changing the way that we

are actually using our data and also the

data centers and the emission

that they bring into our environment

so it’ll take actors like us scientists

technologists academia

policy makers but also you as the end

user we need a cultural

shift toward this digital sobriety

so i will leave you with four main

suggestions there are many of them but

these are simple

enough for you to apply if you were to

buy

next time an electronic system please

look into the specs and choose one with

the least

amount of power

and please use them longer and recycle

them properly

refurbish reformat them if you have to

but use them longer and really don’t

just throw them on the trash you can

take them into a recycling center

and about your computers in your

institutions

you know at night you can turn it off

you think they are in power mode in

sleep mode and they are in ultra low

power mode but no

in a large scale they are consuming a

lot of power when you’re not

using just turn it off

and the last one is to use these

collaborative shared platforms

versus email so if i were to send an

email to

n people with an attachment that would

be copied

n times in the data center for each

person i send it to

rather than creating a lot of these

copies unnecessarily just use one link

one shared thing

that everybody can refer to now that

would make a difference there are

institutions

or people that write you know hundreds

of emails and it institutional level

there can be

thousands of emails and 60

text emails with no attachment is about

one kilometer of car driving in terms of

emission

so how many kilometers are you driving a

day that you didn’t even know about

just by your emails

things like this make a difference in

terms of the data

the power also their emission

and also how we use our electronics so

we are all actors into this

and we all can make an impact and the

change

is really for all of us for scientists

for us end users

and for our governments and policy

makers

so please take play your part and take

this

also seriously thank you