Anderson recognized for Best Oral Paper at IEEE NANO conference

Professor Neal Anderson of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department was awarded first place for the Best Oral Conference Paper at the 12th annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Nanotechnology (IEEE NANO) held Aug. 20-23 in Birmingham, England.

 

The paper, co-authored by Anderson’s graduate students Ilke Ercan and Natesh Ganesh, was titled "Toward Nanoprocessor Thermodynamics." As ECE department head Christopher Hollot said, “This is a very exciting and newsworthy accomplishment, and I believe it’s a harbinger of the discipline’s further recognition of Neal’s contribution to understanding fundamental limitations in the engineering of nanoscale computing.”

“Computer processors generate a tremendous amount of heat, which is a already major problem for current processor technology,” Anderson explained about his paper. “As new generations of computing technologies emerge - technologies based on dense networks of nanoscale components - power efficiency and heat removal concerns will become even more critical. This paper shows how emerging nanoprocessor designs can be evaluated in terms of the minimum amount of heat they must dissipate to perform specified computational tasks, as dictated by fundamental physical law.”
 

A previous paper from Anderson’s group, presented by lead author Ilke Ercan, received a Best Paper Award at last year's EEE NANO conference in Portland, Ore.