Landauer limit

English

Alternative forms

• Landauer's limit

Etymology

After Landauer's principle, named after German-American physicist Rolf Landauer.

Noun

Landauer limit (plural Landauer limits)

1. (physics, information theory) A theoretical lower limit on the energy consumption of a computation, derived from Landauer's principle.
   • 2012, Rolf Drechsler, Robert Wille, Reversible Circuits: Recent Accomplishments and Future Challenges for an Emerging Technology, Hafizur Rahaman, Sanatan Chattopadhyay, Santanu Chattopadhyay (editors), Progress in VLSI Design and Test: 16th International Symposium, Proceedings, Springer, LNCS 7373, page 385,

     The figure shows that today's technology is still a factor of 1,000 away from the Landauer limit and that the expected CMOS development will reduce this to a factor of 100 within the next 10 years.

   • 2021, Caleb Scharf, The Ascent of Information‎^[1], Penguin Random House (Riverhead Books), page 192:

     This Landauer limit is simply an energy, given in equation form as kTln2 . The quantity k is a constant of nature called Boltzmann's constant. The T is the environmental temperature in Kelvin, and ln2 is the natural logarithm of two.

   • 2022, Torben Ægidius Mogensen, Programming Language Design and Implementation, Springer, page 309:

     Using such gates, we can (at least in theory) build a computer that can compute all bijective functions with no theoretical minimum energy use. There will be some energy use (nothing is free), but it can, in theory, be much smaller than the Landauer limit. Single reversible gates that can operate using less power than the Landauer limit have been constructed, but no complex circuitry has yet been constructed from these gates.

Related terms

• Landauer erasure

Translations

theoretical lower limit on the energy consumption of a computation

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See also

• Landauer's principle
• Landauer's erasure principle

Further reading

• Koomey's law on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Limits of computation on Wikipedia.Wikipedia