Hannah Earley, co-founder and CTO of Vaire Computing, is developing computer chips that employ reversible computing to recycle energy typically lost as waste heat. Conventional chips dissipate energy by erasing intermediate information during calculations, akin to a car repeatedly braking and accelerating in a city. Reversible computing, in contrast, retains this information, allowing computations to be run backward and recovering some of the energy. While the concept has existed theoretically for over 50 years, Earley has designed a patent-pending resonator—a microscopic chip component that stores recovered energy for later use—marking a significant practical breakthrough. Last year, Vaire announced a chip with a resonator that recovered more energy than it lost, even accounting for the energy required to power the component, providing empirical validation for a subfield previously confined to theory.
Earley’s journey into chip design began at a young age with programming, progressing to transistors and eventually a PhD at the University of Cambridge under computational biologist Gos Micklem. Initially studying DNA-based calculations, she pivoted to reversible computing after reading Michael Frank’s 1999 PhD thesis on the subject. Convinced of its potential to revolutionize computing by rethinking the relationship between information, energy, and heat, Earley redirected her PhD work to study the physical limits of computation and develop software to convert ordinary programs into reversible ones. After completing her degree in 2021, she co-founded Vaire with Rodolfo Rosini, securing over $12 million in funding and hiring Frank as a senior scientist. The company’s next challenge is integrating their novel chip architecture into existing devices and manufacturing systems, with Earley advocating for a comprehensive reevaluation of computer design from the ground up with reversibility in mind. While researchers acknowledge the interest and potential of Vaire’s approach, they note that the technology remains early-stage and will require further demonstrations to garner industry support for commercialization.