This founder is teaching chips how to recycle (their energy)
This founder is teaching chips how to recycle (their energy)
这位创始人正在教芯片如何回收（它们的能量）
Throughout the history of the computer chip, engineers have treated waste heat as an inevitable cost of a calculation. Hannah Earley, however, thinks it’s a design choice. Earley, 31, is cofounder and chief technology officer of Vaire Computing, a startup building chips that recycle energy usually thrown away as heat—a strategy known as reversible computing. Ultimately, she thinks, this approach could help make data centers (and our laptops and phones) much more energy efficient.
在计算机芯片的发展史上，工程师们一直将废热视为计算过程中不可避免的成本。然而，Hannah Earley 认为这其实是一个设计选择。31 岁的 Earley 是 Vaire Computing 的联合创始人兼首席技术官，这家初创公司正在研发一种能够回收通常作为热量浪费掉的能量的芯片——这种策略被称为“可逆计算”（reversible computing）。她认为，从长远来看，这种方法有助于大幅提高数据中心（以及我们的笔记本电脑和手机）的能源效率。
When conventional computer chips perform calculations, they erase the information they no longer need along the way, dissipating energy as heat in the process. Earley compares the approach to racing through a city only to pump the brakes at every intersection: The car loses momentum and must burn more fuel to accelerate again. Reversible computing aims to keep the momentum going—instead of erasing information from the intermediate steps in a calculation, the circuit retains it, making it possible to run the computation backward and recover some of the energy.
当传统计算机芯片执行计算时，它们会沿途擦除不再需要的信息，并在此过程中以热量的形式耗散能量。Earley 将这种方法比作在城市中飞驰却在每个路口都猛踩刹车：汽车失去了动力，必须消耗更多的燃料来重新加速。可逆计算旨在保持这种动力——电路不会擦除计算中间步骤的信息，而是将其保留下来，从而使计算能够反向运行并回收部分能量。
While the idea was first proposed more than 50 years ago, it proved impractical to implement with existing transistors and circuits. Earley, though, has completely rethought the hardware needed to make energy recovery work. She designed a patent-pending type of resonator—a microscopic chip component that stores recovered energy for later reuse. “It’s really a glorified pendulum,” she says.
虽然这个想法早在 50 多年前就被提出，但事实证明，利用现有的晶体管和电路来实现它并不切实际。然而，Earley 彻底重新思考了实现能量回收所需的硬件。她设计了一种正在申请专利的谐振器——这是一种微小的芯片组件，可以存储回收的能量以供后续重复使用。“它实际上就是一个高级版的钟摆，”她说。
Last year, Vaire announced a key breakthrough: a chip with a resonator that recovered more energy than it lost, even after the energy needed to power the component was taken into account. For a subfield that has existed mostly in theory, the result was proof of life. “It’s clear they have something interesting,” says Igor Markov, a researcher in electronic design automation and a former professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Still, he says, the technology is quite early stage; the company will need “a series of increasingly realistic and convincing demonstrations to attract the industry support needed for commercialization.”
去年，Vaire 宣布了一项关键突破：一种带有谐振器的芯片，即使在计入驱动该组件所需的能量后，其回收的能量仍超过了损耗。对于一个主要存在于理论中的细分领域来说，这一结果证明了其可行性。“很明显，他们确实做出了一些有趣的东西，”电子设计自动化研究员、密歇根大学安娜堡分校前教授 Igor Markov 表示。不过他也指出，这项技术仍处于非常早期的阶段；该公司需要“一系列越来越现实且令人信服的演示，以吸引商业化所需的行业支持。”
Earley’s journey into chip design started sooner than most. She began programming around the age of nine, starting with high-level coding for the web before digging into other programming languages like Perl and Java. She continued progressing to more and more abstract layers of computing, until she got all the way down to transistors. She eventually enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Cambridge under the computational biologist Gos Micklem.
Earley 进入芯片设计领域的历程比大多数人都要早。她大约在九岁时就开始编程，从网页的高级编码开始，随后深入研究了 Perl 和 Java 等其他编程语言。她不断向更抽象的计算层面进阶，直到最终深入到晶体管层面。后来，她进入剑桥大学攻读博士学位，师从计算生物学家 Gos Micklem。
She started out studying how materials such as DNA could be used to perform calculations, but a few months in, Micklem sent her the 1999 PhD thesis of Michael Frank, a pioneer in reversible computing. Earley read it once, felt skeptical, read it again, and sat with it for a few weeks. She gradually became convinced that the connection between information, energy, and heat could change computers forever. The fascination completely redirected her PhD work.
起初，她研究的是如何利用 DNA 等材料进行计算，但几个月后，Micklem 将可逆计算先驱 Michael Frank 1999 年的博士论文发给了她。Earley 读了一遍，感到怀疑，又读了一遍，并花了几周时间反复思考。她逐渐确信，信息、能量和热量之间的联系可能会永远改变计算机。这种着迷彻底改变了她的博士研究方向。
Earley studied the physical limits of computation and built software that could turn ordinary programs into reversible ones. “Eventually I wouldn’t let her put my name on any of her papers, because I felt that I couldn’t really stand up and give a proper talk about them,” Micklem recalls. “It was her stuff.” After completing her degree in 2021, Earley met Rodolfo Rosini, a technology entrepreneur and investor. The pair cofounded Vaire that same year, and the company has since raised more than $12 million, hired Frank as a senior scientist, and begun turning the vision of reversible computing into real hardware.
Earley 研究了计算的物理极限，并开发了可以将普通程序转换为可逆程序的软件。“最终，我不再让她在论文上署我的名字，因为我觉得我无法站出来对这些研究进行恰当的讲解，”Micklem 回忆道，“那是她自己的成果。” 2021 年获得学位后，Earley 结识了科技企业家兼投资人 Rodolfo Rosini。两人于同年共同创立了 Vaire。自那时起，该公司已筹集了超过 1200 万美元资金，聘请了 Frank 担任高级科学家，并开始将可逆计算的愿景转化为真实的硬件。
Innovation, however, doesn’t happen overnight. During the winter of 2022 in Grinnell, Iowa, Earley spent weeks in her now-wife’s basement apartment as the wind chill outside reached roughly −40 °F, covering a whiteboard over and over again with schematics for the core piece of circuitry needed to make reversible logic work. By the time the design finally came together, after the couple had escaped the cold for Las Vegas, it felt less like an aha moment and more like a gradual wave of relief. “I’m not completely out of my depth,” she remembers feeling.
然而，创新并非一蹴而就。2022 年冬天，在爱荷华州格林内尔，Earley 在她现在的妻子的地下室公寓里度过了几周，当时室外的风寒温度达到了约零下 40 华氏度。她一遍又一遍地在白板上画着实现可逆逻辑所需的核心电路原理图。当设计最终完成时，这对夫妇已经逃离严寒来到了拉斯维加斯，那一刻与其说是灵光一现，不如说是一种如释重负的感觉。“我并没有完全束手无策，”她记得当时的感觉。
Earley and her colleagues’ next challenge is making their drastically different chip fit into familiar devices and manufacturing systems. She believes that’s where the future lies—not in further refining existing chips but in rebuilding them from the ground up with an eye toward reversibility. “I want to tackle every part of how computers are built,” Earley says, “and rethink it in these terms.”
Earley 和她的同事们面临的下一个挑战是，如何将这种截然不同的芯片适配到人们熟悉的设备和制造系统中。她认为这就是未来所在——不是进一步改进现有芯片，而是着眼于可逆性，从零开始重建它们。“我想解决计算机制造的每一个环节，”Earley 说，“并用这些原则重新思考它。”