  We propose a novel bound on the mimimum dissipation required in any
circumstances to transfer a certain amount of charge through any resistive
device. We illustrate it on the task of writing a logical 1 (encoded as a
prescribed voltage) into a capacitance, through various linear or nonlinear
devices. We show that, even though the celebrated Landauer bound (which only
applies to bit erasure) does not apply here, one can still formulate a "non-
Landauer" lower bound on dissipation, that crucially depends on the time budget
to perform the operation, as well as the average conductance of the driving
device. We compare our bound with empirical results reported in the literature
and realistic simulations of CMOS pass and transmission gates in decananometer
technology. Our non-Landauer bound turns out to be a quantitative benchmark to
assess the (non-)optimality of a writing operation.
