is the study of the

relationships between heat, work, and energy. Though rooted in physics, it has a clear
application to chemistry, biology, and other sciences: in a sense, physical life itself can be
described as a continual thermodynamic cycle of transformations between heat and energy.
But these transformations are never perfectly efficient, as the second law of thermodynamics
shows. Nor is it possible to get "something for nothing," as the first law of thermodynamics
demonstrates: the work output of a system can never be greater than the net energy input.
These laws disappointed hopeful industrialists of the early nineteenth century, many of whom
believed it might be possible to create a perpetual motion machine. Yet the laws of
thermodynamics did make possible such highly useful creations as the internal combustion
engine and the refrigerator.
Being an Electronics and Communication Engineering student the necessities for
studying Thermodynamics are the followings:
1. In many engineering fields like Robotics, while designing circuits, one must take
into account the heat produced in the circuit and push them away from the circuit
components.
2. While designing any computer controlled air-cooling system, one is to deal with the
core things of Thermodynamics.
3. Today's technology is completely turning towards automation system where all
types of mechanical and applied science applications need to be converted into
programming based/microchip based/wireless communication based system. If one
asks to design any microchip for such application, one must have knowledge energy
conversion system such as heat; and therefore requires knowledge of
thermodynamics. Because, thermodynamics not only deals with heat energy, but also
does with all types of energy conversions, their mathematical derivations and
important ratios.
A lot of the focus is on the heat transfer associated with the power dissipation
problem. In particular, microprocessors dissipate A LOT of power. Without well-designed
cooling systems, the chips would simply burn themselves out. The cooling system is so
important that "in the good old days" major patents protected the cooling system associated
with a new computer design more than the computer design itself.
In particular the original Cray series computers with their emitter-coupled-logic
(ECL) produced so much heat that a special liquid cooling system had to be designed to make
computing with the fast switching logic possible. Prior to the Cray's unique cooling system,
no one was able to harness the power of the ECL on such a massive scale to produce such
meaningful results.
Beyond that, there's also the thermochemistry that is involved with the manufacture of
the electronic components themselves. While photo-lithography and other such techniques
etch the silicon, a lot of thermodynamics goes into the manufacture of the silicon itself (not to
mention the mixing processes associated with the doping process as well.)
Power loss in the electronic system is a very crucial limiting factor that can be
reduced or minimized with the help of using the reversible logics "a concept came from
Thermodynamics".
In the field of cellular hardware, computer hardware nanotechnology, bioinformatics
and CMOS technology, a hardware engineer always demands for a logical ICs which
dissipates very less heat/ energy or ideally no heat. But, now days the number of transistors in
a IC are increasing year as stated by Gorden Moore (Co- founder of Intel) in 1965 called
Moores law. So, with the effect increasing the number of transistors, the heat dissipation by
the hardware will also is also increases. For one bit computation, KTln2 joules of energy/heat
will generates as stated by Rolf Landauer in 1961. Where K is a Boltzmanns constant equal
to 1.38 x 10
22
jK
-2
and T is the absolute temperature at which computation is performed. This
dissipated heat directly correlated to the number of lost bits. In 1973, Bennet shoed that tis
problem can be avoided by designing the electronics hardware by reversible logics OR this
dissipated energy can be saved by using reversible logics.
The main idea of reversible logics comes from the thermodynamics which shows the
advantage of reversible process over irreversible process. According to the second law of
thermodynamics the entropy of the reversible system remains constant and doesnt dissipate
heat during the process. In this we put the system or computer hardware/electronic hardware
equivalent to the heat engine. . So, this is how the idea came in mind of making digital
hardware reversible for no heat dissipation.
To making the digital hardware reversible, the hardware must not only logically
reversible but also must be physically reversible. So, by making the digital hardware
reversible, they will dissipates very less heat or ideally no heat or doesnt lost information i.e.
they becomes adiabatic circuits which recycles their energy.
In this paper, the authors gives the complete information about the logically
reversibility. The interconnection of logical reversibility, physical reversibility, CMOS and
adiabatic logics with thermodynamics is given in the paper in a technical manner. The
authors also shows the structures of reversiblw gates in a logical and physical manner and
also shown the merits and demerits of them. The author shows in the paper that the adiabatic
reversible CMOS logic gate can be very efficient for power reduction.

References:
Pradeep Singla and Satyan. Article:Towards the Solution of Power Dissipation in Electronics
Systems through Thermodynamics. Proceedings of ETEIC-2012: pp 300-303, April-2012
http://www.scienceclarified.com/everyday/Real-Life-Physics-Vol-2/Thermodynamics.html
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111007030450AA1dogM