"Single-Electron Parametron": Reversible Computation in a Discrete-State System

The energy dissipation in a proposed digital device in which discrete degrees of freedom are used to represent digital information (a "single-electron parametron") was analyzed. If the switching speed is not too high, the device may operate reversibly (adiabatically), and the energy dissipation ℰ per bit may be much less than the thermal energy scale kBT (where kB is Boltzmann's constant and T is temperature). The energy-time product ℰtau is, however, much greater than Planck's constant Planck's over 2pi, at least in the standard "orthodox" model of single-electron tunneling that was used in these calculations.