  According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors in the
next 10-15 years the limits imposed by the physics of switch operation will be
the major roadblock for future scaling of the CMOS technology. Among these
limits the most fundamental is represented by the so-called Shannon-von
Neumann-Landauer limit that sets a lower bound to the minimum heat dissipated
per bit erasing operation. Here we show that in a nanoscale switch, operated at
finite temperature T, this limit can be beaten by trading the dissipated energy
with the uncertainty in the distinguishability of switch logic states. We
establish a general relation between the minimum required energy and the
maximum error rate in the switch operation and briefly discuss the potential
applications in the design of future switches.
