| Summary: | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University === PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. === According to the von Neumann-Landauer principle (VNL) for every bit of information lost
during a computation, kT ln 2 amount of heat is dissipated into the environment. Irreversible
logic, the basis of modern computing, inevitably leads to loss of information and is
thus fundamentally bound by the VNL principle. However, its validity has been challenged
since its inception and the case concerning its legitimacy is still open. Due to the tiny energy
scales involved, this debate has been entirely academic in nature and an experimental test
of the VNL principle is highly desired by both proponents and skeptics. Such a test would
entail contrasting the energy dissipation of irreversible and reversible logic. In particular,
we need to perform a non trivial logic both reversibly and irreversibly based on identical
technology, testing whether or not energy dissipation for the reversible computation can be
less than VNL limit while the irreversible computation is limited by the VNL limit.
Reversible logic does not entail information loss, and hence is not bound by the VNL
limit. It offers the potential for indefinite performance improvements of digital electronics.
Bennett's Turing machine first proved that any computation can be performed reversibly
and, in the proper limit, without energy cost. This promise of computing for free has
spurred Fredkin, Toffoli, Wilczek, Feynman and others to propose reversible logic gates,
though very few experimentally-realized reversible logic gates have since been reported.
Here, we experimentally demonstrate for the first time the core of a logically reversible,
CMOS-compatible, scalable nanoelectromechanical Fredkin gate, a universal logic gate from ... [TRUNCATED] === 2031-01-01
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