Thermodynamics of Computation for CMOS NAND Gate

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the thermodynamic costs of a CMOS NAND gate in the sub-threshold region, focusing on heat dissipation bounds and their dependence on initial states, input, and reliability, revealing nuanced trade-offs.

Contribution

It provides a detailed thermodynamic analysis of a CMOS NAND gate, highlighting how initial conditions and input influence heat dissipation and efficiency, which was previously not well understood.

Findings

Landauer bound is consistent across different inputs.

Additional costs vary with initial and steady-state distributions.

No universal trade-off between reliability and dissipation for all inputs.

Abstract

Understanding how much energy is needed and dissipated as heat for a given computational system and for a given program is a physically interesting and practically important problem. However, the thermodynamic costs of computational systems are only partially understood. In this paper, we focus on a specific logic gate, the CMOS NAND gate, operating in the sub-threshold region and analyze the dissipated heat from two aspects. One is the general Landauer bound, which is the change in entropy of the computational system, and the other is a cost that depends on the difference between the initial and steady-state distributions of the system. We find that the general Landauer bound is the same order for different inputs to the gate, but that the another cost has partially different order due to the difference between the initial and steady-state distributions over output logical states. We also investigate the interplay between the costs, time scale, and reliability of the process and find that for different inputs, there is not always a trade-off between reliability and dissipation of computations.