ABSTRACT
The first electronic computers or calculating machines were designed with vacuum tubes to significantly improve the speed over electromechanical machines. The introduction of transistors in the design of computers, although not really aiming at power reduction, nevertheless achieved a significant decrease of their power consumption. A transistor consumes roughly 1000 times less than a vacuum tube. The ideas were rediscovered recently and used to reduce the power consumption of systems on chip. The history of low–power electronics really starts with the invention of the bipolar transistor. The second major step in low–power electronics history was the invention of the low-power integrated circuits because on–chip interconnects consume much less power than off–chip connections. The microelectronics revolution is fascinating: the transistor was invented, and today using 130 and 90 nanometers technologies. The carbon nanotubes, quantum dots, single-electron devices, or molecular switches are the most promising nanodevices.
