A universal tradeoff between power, precision and speed in physical communication

Understand

Maximizing the speed and precision of communication while minimizing power dissipation is a fundamental engineering design goal.

• Also, biological systems achieve remarkable speed, precision and power efficiency using poorly understood physical design principles.
• Powerful theories like information theory and thermodynamics do not provide general limits on power, precision and speed.
• Here we go beyond these classical theories to prove that the product of precision and speed is universally bounded by power dissipation in any physical communication channel whose dynamics is faster than that of the signal.