He loves electrobeats as much as electrochemistry: Rainer Waser does not fit into any pigeonhole. The director of a Peter Grünberg Institute at Forschungszentrum Jülich and professor at RWTH Aachen University is both a visionary and a tinkerer – someone who looks beyond the boundaries of individual subjects, who gets carried away, whose enthusiasm is infectious and who puts his energy into more than just research. The 67-year-old has never been one to miss out on joy and fun.
His first chemistry laboratory in Heusenstamm was closed against his will. At that time, the spark not only literally ignited in his parents’ basement, but also in his mind: 15-year-old Rainer Waser wanted to become a chemist. After the unintended real-life “spark”, however, he had to promise his parents that he would not open his “basement lab” again until he actually studied chemistry. “That’s what I started doing in 1974,” the 67-year-old recalls. He reopened the lab one room further – in the slightly larger basement toilet. “I had water and electrical connections right there.” For many years, the now internationally networked scientist experimented within these four walls. He tinkered, drilled and built test stands as well as electronic systems such as amplifiers and loudspeakers. “I poured all my pocket money into this,” says Waser and smiles – something the director of the Peter Grünberg Institute likes to do a lot: his motto is “research with pleasure”.
The anecdote from Waser’s youth reveals a lot about the successful natural scientist and engineer, who received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2014 for his research on resistive switches as memory in information technology. Waser is someone who likes to consider disciplines anew, who is not afraid to cross boundaries, and who leads his team with confidence and assurance, always looking for new challenges and solutions – in the service of science and society: “Interesting research often takes place at the interfaces of disciplines,” Waser sums up.
The best example of this is his research on memristive devices. These have properties similar to nerve cells in the human brain and are therefore considered a promising basis for neuromorphic circuits. They could be used to build energy-efficient computers modelled on the brain, such as those needed for AI applications. Waser had discovered how the components function at the atomic level and thus laid the foundation for their technical use.
Sounds futuristic, but the father of two and patchwork father of four has always been a bit ahead of his time: for his doctorate at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the early 1980s, he built a fully automatic, computer-controlled test bench. “It’s standard today, but there was nothing like that back then,” says Waser. He had a Z 80 sent to him from England, where he spent two semesters abroad as a scholarship holder of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation in Southampton and published his first paper. “The computer consisted of one huge circuit board and a thousand individual parts – and had no screen or memory,” he recalls. The doctoral researcher even had to write the software himself, in assembler code. He did not waste a single thought on failure. In the end, all that was missing was an electrochemical measuring system, a so-called potentiostat, supposed to cost DM5,000 – money that the institute could not afford. Waser bet his doctoral supervisor Konrad Georg Weil a meal that he would succeed in building the device himself within a week. The doctoral supervisor lost. “I hardly slept and kept drilling, soldering and measuring around the clock in my basement lab. I exposed the boards with my mother’s sunlamp. Sounds a bit crazy, I guess,” says Waser. He even integrated a screen into the measuring stand – namely his grandmother’s discarded black-and-white television. In Waser’s life, nothing is impossible. When talking about his research, his enthusiasm is irresistible – always with a quiet smile or grin, polite, never pushy, but full of energy and drive.
Rainer Waser would like to bring together various disciplines and researchers from all over the world - from neuromorphic computing, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, for example - at an international conference in Aachen in June 2024. That’s where I want to drive exchange further,” says Waser.
About Rainer Waser:
Born in Darmstadt on 16 September 1955, Rainer Waser studied chemistry at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where he also completed his doctorate after a research stay in Southampton. He then worked in industry for eight years before being appointed professor by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at RWTH Aachen University in 1992. Since 1997, he has also been the director of the Peter Grünberg Institute for Electronic Materials (PGI-7) at Forschungszentrum Jülich. He is considered one of the most cited representatives of his fields of research. His current research is focused on making storage elements smaller and thus more energy efficient. In 2014, he was awarded the German Research Foundation’s Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the most important and most highly endowed research funding prize in Germany. Among other things, he succeeded in obtaining the structural change project “NEUROTEC” to develop, together with companies and research institutions in the Rhineland Region, basic technologies for neuromorphic computing and other alternative concepts to conventional computer technology. The project entered its second phase at the end of 2021 and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research with €36.5 million until 2026.
However, his love of electrochemistry and physics is not the end point of his enthusiasm. For example, he used the time between leaving school and starting at university to attend lectures in Frankfurt and Darmstadt: quantum mechanics, philosophy and music theory – the inquisitive young Waser took it all in, “even if a lot of it was way beyond my level of knowledge at the time”. En passant, he wrote a paper on the sociology of music, which later won an award at the European level. For music in and of itself: here, too, Waser cannot be pigeonholed. The man, almost 1.90 metres tall, listens to medieval sounds as well as metal, classical music, electronic beats or world music. When he sits at his computer in his office at home in Aachen, he always listens to music. One of his most memorable musical experiences: a visit to Belgium’s Tomorrowland festival in 2015, a mecca for techno and rave fans – at the age of 59. “Fantastic!”, he still raves today. When he celebrated his 60th birthday a few months later, the festival with its fairytale ambiance served as a template for him. “First there were many great scientific lectures, and later there was dancing, dressed up to the motto ‘60 Years of Craziness’ – research with pleasure,” says the professor of electronic materials.
2024 will mark the official the end. He is placid about his “after work” time: “After all, no one is stopping me from continuing. But I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.” In any case, he wants to devote more time to philosophy. “There are also more fitness activities on the agenda,” says Waser, who has a hang-gliding licence, goes skiing and roller-skating. At the moment, he limits himself to a few minutes of trampolining in his own house – to music, of course: “In a minimum of time, I deliberately bring my pulse up to 130 once a day. That’s healthy and goes easy on the joints.” Efficient training leaves him more time for his work. Extreme sports like base jumping or sky diving fascinate him, but he no longer wants to do them as the risk of injury is too great – and so is the risk to his long-term goal: when he turns 100, he wants to throw a big birthday party where he chooses the music and dances. “With the help of an exoskeleton, if necessary,” says Rainer Waser and smiles. One can bet he will, too.
More power, less energy use – this is how researchers imagine the computer of the future. A new type is to make this possible: the neuromorphic computer. At its core are so-called memristive components, which are modelled on the human brain.
For certain tasks, such as recognizing patterns and language, our brain only needs around one ten-thousandth of the energy that a conventional computer consumes. One of the reasons for this: the memory and processor in computers are separated from each other, and large amounts of data have to be constantly transported back and forth. This costs energy and slows down the calculations. The brain is different: there, calculations are performed directly in the data memory, the biological synapses. Memristive components – to whose development Rainer Waser and his teams at Jülich and RWTH Aachen University have made a significant contribution – utilize this principle. They can store information through an adjustable resistance value and process it at the same time. The components are also compatible with conventional microelectronics and can be miniaturized very well down to the nanometre range. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in particular could benefit from respective neuromorphic systems.
In the NEUROTEC project, which Rainer Waser is coordinating, the partners are working on practice-orientated demonstrators for AI applications. They want to show how much more efficient neuro-inspired AI will be. The project entered its second phase at the end of 2021 and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research with €36.5 million until 2026.
Text: Katja Lüers | image (top): Forschungszentrum Jülich/Sascha Kreklau
