Author: Yong Tao Tan
Date: 2026-09-25
The construction industry continues to be one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emission. This is despite numerous green-building policies, progressive industry initiatives and innovative solutions aimed at decarbonize cement. With rapid developments in alternative fuels, renewable electricity, electrified heating, electrochemistry, energy storage and system optimization, techno-economically viable reductions in cement emissions may finally be realized.
Despite its early development, thermodynamic-aware computation such as reversible computing remained peripheral due to the rapid scalign of conventional silicon computing. The recent growth of artificial interlligence and its energy demand, however, has renewed concerns about the sustainability of existing paradigms. This has revived interests in thermodynamic approaches, including thermodynamics computing which allows fluctuations to enter the system and uses them to aid state space exploration. Computation then emerges from the resulting non-equilibrium dynamics. We investigate reversible computing, thermodynamics computing and other adjacent paradigms, and elucidate how these approaches overlap and complement one another.
Author: Yong Tao Tan
Date: 2026-09-22
Author: Yong Tao Tan
Date: 2026-09-21
As transistors enter the nanosheet era, new challenges arise as silicon scaling approaches the sub-nanometer-thickness regime. Two-dimensional materials, specifically transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), are a group of atomically thin materials with semiconducting properties. With enhanced electrostatic control enabled by their dangling-bond-free surfaces, they are poised to inherit the role of silicon. Yet, their integration into the decades-old, mature semiconductor industry is economically challenging, requiring new processes for almost every component of the transistor, from channel growth to contact and dielectric engineering. We review the headwinds faced by TMDs and point to possible solutions.
Author: Yong Tao Tan
Date: 2026-09-18
Hydrogen has been in the centre of controversies of the sustainability movement over the past few decades. Interests of using hydrogen as the ultimate green fuel started from the early 1970s and have since have its ups and downs as the technoeconomic landscape evolved. Renewable energy, the main source for green hydrogen production, has gotten cheaper than ever. Will hydrogen finally have what it takes to capitalize on this new development and become the mainstream?
Artificial intelligence is touted as the next industrial revolution and is promising to change most parts in life. Demand for energy has also been booming due to the endless appetite for compute. This has placed immense stress in existing and old infrastructure causing worry and even unrest. The very crux of this problem lies in the mismatch between the hardware-software stack and the problems to be solved. Probabilistic computing is promising to introduce a new paradigm of computing that is highly energy efficient due to its problem- and physics-aware architecture. Read more to learn why we think academic-industry partnership is essential in the development and scaling on this potentially impactful technology.