Digital technology is evolving rapidly in our society. This development appears to be very useful for some of our daily activities in a wide range of applications, but it is also leading to a considerable permanent increase in the amount of data being transferred and processed. Given that all operations in this field are mainly based on electronic equipment and materials, this societal field leads to exponential growth in energy consumption (mainly electrical). Within a decade, this could lead to a deleterious global lock-in, with digital activity absorbing all the worlds energy production. Worse still, we can see that the enthusiasm of political and industrial decision-makers for the use of artificia intelligence is leading to an unconsidered acceleration in the amount of data processed in data centers, and therefore to an acceleration in energy consumption which, in many cases, is not useful to society.
Several approaches are needed to avoid this global future disaster. On the one hand, we need to reconsider digital usage by informing the entire world population, and on the other hand, we need to drastically reduce the consumption of all equipment and materials used in the digital world. As the latter is physically based essentially on electronics, it is in this area that efforts to increase skills and knowledge must be focused. These skills cover not only the purely technical aspects of electronics, microelectronics and nanotechnologies, but also other more societal areas such as user behavior, or the effects on health and the environment. The challenge is great, and pooling these efforts is one way of avoiding the worst.
The aim of this stream is to foster brainstorming on these approaches, with a view to opening up multidisciplinary lines of action focused on priority challenges. Thus, improvements brought about by adapting circuit and system technologies and architectures, and by enhancing the IT tools used to drive the devices, are the top priorities. In addition, the various technological approaches used to achieve these objectives, by opening up the spectrum of physics (optics, quantum, materials), are also of paramount importance. Finally, pedagogical approaches aimed at providing future player with skills and know-how, combined with an effort to increase the attractiveness of the skills pool,
are also included. Analyses of environmental limits can also contribute to the overall thinking around this area of workstream.
Olivier Bonnaud
University of Rennes, France
Executive Director of National Coordination or Higher Education in Microelectronics and Nanotechnologies (France)
Olivier.bonnaud@univ-rennes.fr