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ESE Fall Seminar – “New Pathways for Energy Efficient Computing Hardware”
October 23, 2025 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
This winter the Americans will see a price hike in their electricity bill – not because of any issues related to energy generation but rather because of the rapidly increasing energy demand by the Data Centers. Energy efficiency is becoming critical not only to maintain the incessant advanced march of computing, but also to ensure that electronics does not become a drag on the finite energy resources of the world. This will need a radical rethinking of the basic building blocks that constitute the electronic hardware. In this talk, I shall briefly present how exploiting physics and functional materials to augment CMOS may offer a new pathway for energy efficiency. In particular, I shall discuss logic, memory, and backend technologies where we have achieved record performance by combining ultrathin ferroelectric materials with CMOS. These examples underscore how functional augmentation of CMOS by harnessing new materials could offer opportunities that are otherwise not available through conventional means.
Sayeef Salahuddin
TSMC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California Berkeley
S. Salahuddin is the TSMC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California Berkeley. His group works at the intersection of novel materials and new physics phenomena with the goal of advancing microelectronic applications. Salahuddin discovered the Negative Capacitance effect in ferroelectric materials. Negative capacitance exploits the dipolar interaction in the ferroelectrics, resulting in a capacitance enhancement that has been adopted for the most advanced microprocessors of today.
Salahuddin received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama. In addition, he received the IEEE Andrew S Grove Award, a technical field award given by IEEE for ‘For outstanding contributions to solid-state devices and technology’.
Salahuddin is the Berkeley PI of the Stanford-Berkeley CA Pacific Northwest AI Microelectronics Hub. He served as the chair the IEEE Electron Devices Society committee on Nanotechnology (2014-16) and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Electron Devices Letters, the premier journal for electron devices.
Salahuddin is a Fellow of the IEEE, the APS and the AAAS.