This founder is teaching chips how to recycle (their energy)

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.” She gradually became convinced that the connection between information, energy, and heat could change computers forever. 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. 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.