Designing Memory Bits with Dissipation lower than the Landauer's Bound

Abstract

A Brownian particle in a symmetric double well potential is used as a representation for a single bit memory, where, the location of the particle in either well denotes one of the two states of a single bit memory. This article analyzes the effect of modifications to a symmetric double well potential on the minimum heat dissipation associated with erasure of the information stored in a single bit memory. Two types of modifications are considered, viz., overlap between the two wells and the asymmetry between the two wells of a bit of memory. Moreover, the analysis presented here, takes into account the uncertainty in the success of the erasure process. We quantify the effect of the proposed modifications on the heat dissipation accompanying erasure of a bit of information with a comparison to the Landauer's bound. In particular, we conclude that the proposed modifications could result in the minimum heat dissipation being lower than the Landauer's bound in quasi-static erasure processes. Furthermore, we quantify the physical aspect ratio for designing a memory bit which could improve memory density.