“More than Moore”: a glimpse at the future of computing

Earlier this year, Gordon Moore, co-founder of the chipmaker Intel, passed away aged 94. As well as helping to launch the era of the personal computer, Moore is known for his eponymous law, which states that the number of transistors on a computer chip will double about every two years.

This remarkable doubling has occurred since Moore’s law was first postulated in 1965 and has brought us mobile phones with vastly more computing power than was available on the entire planet six decades ago.

However, the atomic nature of matter and the laws of physics mean that transistors cannot keep shrinking forever; and researchers are currently looking for new ways of boosting computing power, without having to pack evermore silicon devices onto chips.

To explore what lies beyond the era of Moore’s law, IOP Publishing is presenting a webinar called “More than Moore”, which will look at some of the technologies that could play roles in the computers of the future.

The webinar will bring together:

• Steve Furber (ICL professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, UK), who does research on neural systems engineering;
• Chaoran Huang (assistant professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong), who works on silicon photonics, photonic integrated circuits, and nonlinear optics;
• Bhavin Shastri (assistant professor at Queen’s University, Canada), who designs and builds programmable nanophotonic processors; and
• Renbao Liu (professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong), who works on quantum nonlinear spectroscopy.

Each speaker will give an overview of their research and a perspective on the future of computing, before convening for a panel discussion. Members of the audience will have the opportunity to pitch questions directly to the panel.

Steve Furber, CBE FRS FREng is ICL professor of computer engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. After completing a BA in mathematics and a PhD in aerodynamics at the University of Cambridge, UK, he spent the 1980s at Acorn Computers, where he was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. More than 250 bn ARM-powered chips have since been manufactured, powering much of the world’s mobile and embedded computing. He moved to the ICL chair at Manchester in 1990, where he leads research into asynchronous and low-power systems and, more recently, neural systems engineering, where the SpiNNaker project has delivered a computer incorporating a million ARM processors optimized for brain-modelling applications.

Chaoran Huang, received a PhD from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2016. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, from 2017 to 2021. She is currently an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has broad research interests in optical computing, photonic integrated circuits, and optical communications. Her current research focuses on developing novel photonic devices, integrated circuits, and complementary algorithms for high-performance AI computing and information processing. She has published more than 50 papers, including Nature Electronics and Nature Communications. She has served as co-chair, TPC member of many international conferences, and the editorial board member of Communication Engineering in the Nature Portfolio. She was the recipient of the 2019 Rising Stars Women in Engineering Asia and the 2022 Optica 20th Anniversary Challenge Prize.

Bhavin J Shastri is an assistant professor of engineering physics at Queen’s University and a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute. He was an associate research scholar (2016–2018) and Banting and NSERC postdoctoral fellow (2012–2016) at Princeton University. He received a PhD in electrical engineering (photonics) from McGill University in 2012. He is a co-author of the book Neuromorphic Photonics, a term he helped coin. Shastri is the recipient of a 2022 iCANX Young Scientist Award, the 2022 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award, and the 2020 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics “for his pioneering contributions to neuromorphic photonics”. He is a Senior Member of Optica and IEEE.

Renbao Liu got his BSc in 1995 from Nanjing University, Department of Physics and a PhD in 2000 from Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Science. After postdoctoral research in Center for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University and in Department of Physics, University of California – San Diego, he joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2005 as a faculty member of Department of Physics, where has been a full professor since 2014.