The non-Landauer Bound for the Dissipation of Bit Writing Operation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new lower bound on energy dissipation for charge transfer in resistive devices, dependent on time and conductance, extending beyond the Landauer limit for bit erasure.

Contribution

It formulates a novel non-Landauer dissipation bound applicable to bit writing, considering operation time and device conductance, with empirical validation.

Findings

The bound depends on operation time and conductance.

It provides a benchmark for assessing writing operation efficiency.

Empirical and simulation results support the bound's relevance.

Abstract

We propose a novel bound on the mimimum dissipation required in any circumstances to transfer a certain amount of charge through any resistive device. We illustrate it on the task of writing a logical 1 (encoded as a prescribed voltage) into a capacitance, through various linear or nonlinear devices. We show that, even though the celebrated Landauer bound (which only applies to bit erasure) does not apply here, one can still formulate a "non- Landauer" lower bound on dissipation, that crucially depends on the time budget to perform the operation, as well as the average conductance of the driving device. We compare our bound with empirical results reported in the literature and realistic simulations of CMOS pass and transmission gates in decananometer technology. Our non-Landauer bound turns out to be a quantitative benchmark to assess the (non-)optimality of a writing operation.