Evolutionary design of thermodynamic logic gates and their heat emission

2026-02-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the significant gap between the thermodynamic dissipation of conventional logic gates and the Landauer limit, as well as the high energy overhead of existing near-limit erasure schemes that rely on external control. The authors propose an integrated approach that embeds thermal management directly into the computational architecture, employing a genetic algorithm to co-optimize the control structure and the thermodynamic behavior of information carriers. By combining evolutionary design with thermodynamic modeling and information–energy coupling, their simulation-based framework achieves parity in heat dissipation between control units and information carriers within logic gates and enables active heat redirection from information carriers to control units. This study demonstrates the feasibility of treating thermal management as an intrinsic component of computation, offering a novel paradigm for low-dissipation computing that approaches the Landauer limit.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Evolutionary Computation
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects and information design of Web, GenAI, and cloud computing
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments

Abstract

Landauer's principle bounds the heat generated by logical operations, but in practice the thermodynamic cost of computation is dominated by the control systems that implement logic. CMOS gates dissipate energy far above the Landauer bound, while laboratory demonstrations of near-Landauer erasure rely on external measurement or feedback systems whose energy costs exceed that of the logic operation by many orders of magnitude. Here we use simulations to show that a genetic algorithm can program a thermodynamic computer to implement logic operations in which the total heat emitted by the control system is of a similar order of magnitude to that of the information-bearing degrees of freedom. Moreover, the computer can be programmed so that heat is drawn away from the information-bearing degrees of freedom and dissipated within the control unit, suggesting the possibility of computing architectures in which heat management is an integral part of the program design.

Problem

• thermodynamic logic gates
• heat emission
• Landauer's principle
• control systems
• energy efficiency

Innovation

• thermodynamic computing
• genetic algorithm
• Landauer's principle
• heat management
• logic gates