Christopher

Yea, there are bunches of things. How about cold fusion? There was a buzz a few years back, maybe decades back as I'm getting old. It was an interesting concept and there's no reason to believe their failure means you won't succeed (that sounds like a double negative...) On that topic, how about incremental improvements to solar energy collection? Maybe not as glamorous but sorely needed. How about energy storage? Better batteries possibly or other storage paradigms. How about energy efficiency improvements? Save a few watts times a billion users would be significant. Another topic which strays more to the math of things is artificial intelligence. There's lots of room for innovation in AI. A lot of new design is built on other's innovations. For example, 3 D printing is opening up new possibilities in manufacturing that in turn can lead to new designs. I got more verbose than I intended. It's not all done! There's a boat-load of possibilities.

I don't know the internals of that part but some processors have a hibernate mode where some tiny amount of energy maintains the memory, even for years on a tiny battery.

For high speed digital I often analyzed worst case component propagation times as well as propagation down the circuit board traces. For medical designs "Failure Effects and Modes Analysis" was employed. In other words, what happens on any single component failure? The first medical company I worked at went a step further and analyzed two point failures when one of the failures was undetectable. Later in servers a similar analysis was performed to address malign hacks and their mitigation. One of my favorites from college was modeling op-amp circuits as a virtual short in computing the output.