Vaire Computing is a start-up seeking to commercialize computer chips based on the principles of reversible computing – a topic Earley studied during her PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, UK. The central idea behind reversible computing is that reversible operations use much less energy, and thus generate much less waste heat, than those in conventional computers.
What skills do you use every day in your job?
In an early-stage start-up environment, you have to wear lots of different hats. Right now, I’m planning for the next few years, but I’m also very deep into the engineering side of Vaire, which spans a lot of different areas.
The skill I use most is my ability to jump into a new field and get up to speed with it as quickly as possible, because I cannot claim to be an expert in all the different areas we work in. I cannot be an expert in integrated circuit design as well as developing electronic design automation tooling as well as building better resonators. But what I can do is try to learn about all these things at as deep a level as I can, very quickly, and then guide the people around me with higher-level decisions while also having a bit of fun and actually doing some engineering work.
What do you like best and least about your job?
We have so many great people at Vaire, and being able to talk with them and discuss all the most interesting aspects of their specialities is probably the part I like best. But I’m also enjoying the fact that in a few years, all this work will culminate in an actual product based on things I worked on when I was in academia. I love theory, and I love thinking about what could be possible in hundreds of years’ time, but seeing an idea get closer and closer to reality is great.
The part I have more of a love-hate relationship with is just how intense this job is. I’m probably intrinsically a workaholic. I don’t think I’ve ever had a good balance in terms of how much time I spend on work, whether now or when I was doing my PhD or even before. But when you are responsible for making your company succeed, that degree of intensity becomes unavoidable. It feels difficult to take breaks or to feel comfortable taking breaks, but I hope that as our company grows and gets more structured, that part will improve.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known when you were starting out in your career?
There are so many specifics of what it means to build a computer chip that I wish I’d known. I may even have suffered a little bit from the Dunning–Kruger effect [in which people with limited experience of a particular topic overestimate their knowledge] at the beginning, thinking, “I know what a transistor is like. How hard can it be to build a large-scale integrated circuit?”
It turns out it’s very, very hard, and there’s a lot of complexity around it. When I was a PhD student, it felt like there wasn’t that big a gap between theory and implementation. But there is, and while to some extent it’s not possible to know about something until you’ve done it, I wish I’d known a lot more about chip design a few years ago.
The post Ask me anything: Hannah Earley – ‘I love theory, but seeing an idea get closer and closer to reality is great’ appeared first on Physics World.
