The Sir Henry Royce Institute at Cambridge is building new materials to slash the energy consumed by the computers, phones, and data centres that underpin modern life. Today’s silicon-based electronics waste huge amounts of energy as heat, and the physical limits of the technology are approaching. This project tackles that bottleneck by focusing on three areas: harvesting energy from the environment to power tiny autonomous devices, radically improving battery energy density and longevity for portable electronics, and developing new materials for processors and memory that operate near the theoretical minimum energy—many orders of magnitude below current silicon. The work is part of a national institute that aims to shorten the time from a materials discovery in a lab to a working device in a factory. If successful, the research could make smartphones last weeks on a single charge, enable sensors that run indefinitely without batteries, and slash the enormous electricity bills of data centres. It also targets the quieter infrastructure of energy-efficient ICT—the invisible systems that keep communications, cloud computing, and the internet running without overwhelming the grid.
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As a national institute, The Sir Henry Royce Institute (SHRI) for Advanced Materials, will provide the missing 'link' in the UK innovation chain allowing the iterative design of advanced materials for various applications, at speed and reasonable cost, providing a critical component to delivering on the government's economic strategy. The Institute will reduce the time-scales to translate discoveries to applications, provide strategic leadership together with training and career development in areas of particular need. The aim is to establish the Sir Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials as an 'An international flagship for the accelerated discovery and development of new materials systems for the economic and societal benefit of the UK.'. The SHRI will cover the invention and manufacture of Soft Materials; Functional Materials; Structural Engineering Materials and Energy Materials along with the necessary facilities to test and characterise them within a framework that emphasises the sustainable use of materials. Initially there will be 9 core material areas led by founding partners. Chemical Materials Discovery Biomedical Materials and Devices Materials for Energy Efficient ICT Atoms to Devices 2D Materials Systems Advanced Metals Processing Materials systems for Demanding Environments Energy Storage Nuclear materials The Cambridge spoke of the Sir Henry Royce Institute is based at the Maxwell Centre at the University of Cambridge. The Cambridge Sir Henry Royce Institute activity will focus on Materials for Energy Efficient ICT, which has three overarching themes: 1. Materials for Energy Efficient Energy Generation with a focus on new materials and devices that are able to power autonomous devices by harnessing energy from the environment. 2. Materials for Energy Efficient Energy Storage with a focus on significant improvements in the energy density, longevity, cost and compatibility of the various energy storage technologies required to power the next generation of ICT devices. 3. Materials for Energy Efficient Use with a focus on radical approaches to reduce power consumption in processing and memory, towards the theoretical limits that are many orders of magnitude below current silicon-based technology (and are approached in biological systems).
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