the coveted dream of using self-organization effects in such a way that nano machines assemble themselves is still a thing of the future.
The rotors developed in Garching are an important step in this direction.
Reversible logic could cut the energy wasted by computers to zero. But significant challenges lie ahead.
By some estimates the difference between the amount of energy required to carry out a computation and the amount that today's computers actually use, is some eight orders of magnitude. Clearly, there is room for improvement.
There are one or two caveats, of course. The first is that nobody has succeeded in building a properly reversible logic gate so this work is entirely theoretical.
But there are a number of computing schemes that have the potential to work like this. Thapliyal and Ranganathan point in particular to the emerging technology of quantum cellular automata and show how their approach might be applied.
We did look at making computation powers more efficient from the bio perspective (efficiency of computations in brain). This paper was actually the base for our discussion on a new approsach to computing http://atlas.estec.esa.int/ACTwiki/images/6/68/Sarpeshkar.pdf and led to several ACT internal studies
:) so Technology Review wrote the article now, based on an arXiv paper uploaded only now, but actually the paper was already published in Nature last year: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys1636