Bounded substrate comparison

Silicon energy and biological metabolic cost

Can energy efficiency be compared across electronic and living systems?

chip, board, host, and interfaces

Silicon system

Valid claim: Consumes measured electrical energy within the declared boundary.

cells plus life-support and instrumentation

Living system

Valid claim: Has estimated metabolic and laboratory support costs within declared boundaries.

Comparable axes

  • Same task outcome
  • Time interval
  • Included infrastructure

Non-equivalences

  • ATP or metabolic estimates are not wall-plug joules.
  • Culture support and readout may dominate.

Comparison procedure

  1. 1.Draw system boundaries.
  2. 2.Measure each native quantity.
  3. 3.Convert only with a published accounting model.

Prohibited inference

Do not claim biological energy superiority by comparing metabolism alone with a complete electronic system, or chip core energy with full laboratory support.

Connected concepts and sources

Benchmarking, energy, and task equivalenceHybrid bioelectronic systems
  1. NeuroBench: Advancing Neuromorphic Computing Through Collaborative, Fair and Representative Benchmarking · National Institute of Standards and Technology
  2. Organoid intelligence (OI): the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish · Frontiers in Science