Meet the Jury Laurent Vila on Ultra low energy computing with non-volatile ferroic order

Arenberg Doctoral School is proud to invite you to Meet The Jury!

When internationally renowned experts visit KU Leuven as a member of a PhD Examination Committee, we like to seize this opportunity to give this expert a forum to a large audience. All members of Science, Engineering & Technology are most welcome to the Meet The Jury Lectures.

Dr. Laurent Vila (University of Grenoble Alpes, France) will give a lecture on “Ultra low energy computing with non-volatile ferroic order”.

Ferrolectric materials allows the design of ultra-low power devices, thanks to the non-volatile nature of the ferroic order and its control with a pure voltage based switching at the lowest switching energy possible. This ferroelectric order has a direct imprint into the orbital and spin texture of Rahsba states appearing at their surface. This opens a route to control the output voltage of Ferro Electric Spin Orbit (FESO) devices actually developed by NELLOW [1,2]. FESO can be used either as inverter or in majority gates, which allow remapping any Boolean function with enhanced functional density. FESO allows memory and logic functions to be spatially gathered, to reduce the energy-costly data transfers. It is possible to envision energies per operation of the order of ten attojoules (10-18 J), two to three orders of magnitude below what can be achieved with the current CMOS technology. At constant performance, FESO thus seeks a huge 1000-fold reduction of the energy consumption. At constant power consumption, the FESO technology can yield a drastic increase in computation power. Moreover, this non-volatile logic technology allows increasing the functional density of logic chips by typically a factor of 5, thus offering a cost-effective solution for ICTs. Last not least, ferroelectric materials are an efficient platform for low energy, high endurance memristor based AI chips [3]. [1] P. Noel et al. Nature, 580(7804), 483-486 (2020). [2] S. Varotto et al. Nature Electronics, 4(10), 740-747 (2021). [3] A. Chanthbouala et al. Nature Mater 11, 860–864 (2012).

Following the lecture, there will be opportunity for young researchers to interact with him.

• Venue: TBD
• Date: 5 October 2026 – 14:00-15:00
• Dr. Laurent Vila is visiting KU Leuven on the occasion of the PhD defence of Kaiquan Fan