Today’s computing challenges: opportunities for computer hardware design

Abstract

Due to the explosive increase of digital data creation, demand on advancement of computing capability is ever increasing. However, the legacy approaches that we have used for continuous improvement of three elements of computer (process, memory, and interconnect) have started facing their limits, and therefore are not as effective as they used to be and are also expected to reach the end in the near future. Evidently, it is a large challenge for computer hardware industry. However, at the same time it also provides great opportunities for the hardware design industry to develop novel technologies and to take leadership away from incumbents. This paper reviews the technical challenges that today’s computing systems are facing and introduces potential directions for continuous advancement of computing capability, and discusses where computer hardware designers find good opportunities to contribute.

Scaling aligned carbon nanotube transistors to a sub-10 nm node

“…Emerging IC technologies with novelties in materials, device structures/mechanisms, and system architectures have been intensively explored in academia and industry to meet the ever-increasing computing demands [2][3][4][5] . One of the most promising methods is to use semiconductors with an ultrathin body and a high carrier mobility as active channels to construct eld-effect transistors (FETs) with a better scaling down property and higher performance than Si transistors, which provides signi cant improvement in performance and integration density for future digital IC applications [6][7][8] .…”

Soft-core processor integration based on different instruction set architectures and field programmable gate array custom datapath implementation

“…As demonstrated in practice, Moore’s law validated the theory of continuous scaling and miniaturization of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC). This theory, along with the concept of abstraction, has guided the semiconductor industry to the present day leading to the emergence of System on Chip (SoC), hybrid scheduling ( Ghavidel, Sedaghat & Naghibzadeh, 2020 ; Aurora Dugo et al, 2022 ), heterogeneous multicore processors ( Pei, Kim & Gaudiot, 2016a ; Krishnakumar et al, 2020 ), and hardware microkernels ( Dantas, De Azevedo & Gimenez, 2019a ), today’s computing systems ( Bae, 2021 ) and Internet of Things (IoT) concepts. With technological development, designers of central processing units have developed modern IC in various forms such as FPGAs ( Li et al, 2022 ), complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which are faster and smaller, consume less power and, last but not least, are cheaper.…”