Tag Archives: general-purpose neuromemristive processor

Knowm (sounds like gnome?) A memristor company with a commercially available product

German garden gnome Date: 11 August 2006 (original upload date) Source:Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons. Author: Colibri1968 at English Wikipedia

German garden gnome
Date 11 August 2006 (original upload date)
Source Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.
Author Colibri1968 at English Wikipedia

I thought the ‘gnome’knowm’ homonym or, more precisely, homophone, might be an amusing way to lead into yet another memristor story on this blog.  A Sept. 3, 2015 news item on Azonano features a ‘memristor-based’ company/organization, Knowm,

Knowm Inc., a start-up pioneering next-generation advanced computing architectures and technology, today announced they are the first to develop and make commercially-available memristors with bi-directional incremental learning capability.

The device was developed through research from Boise State University’s [Idaho, US] Dr. Kris Campbell, and this new data unequivocally confirms Knowm’s memristors are capable of bi-directional incremental learning. This has been previously deemed impossible in filamentary devices by Knowm’s competitors, including IBM [emphasis mine], despite significant investment in materials, research and development. With this advancement, Knowm delivers the first commercial memristors that can adjust resistance in incremental steps in both direction rather than only one direction with an all-or-nothing ‘erase’. This advancement opens the gateway to extremely efficient and powerful machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.

A Sept. 2, 2015 Knowm news release (also on MarketWatch), which originated the news item, provides more details,

“Having commercially-available memristors with bi-directional voltage-dependent incremental capability is a huge step forward for the field of machine learning and, particularly, AHaH Computing,” said Alex Nugent, CEO and co-founder of Knowm. “We have been dreaming about this device and developing the theory for how to apply them to best maximize their potential for more than a decade, but the lack of capability confirmation had been holding us back. This data is truly a monumental technical milestone and it will serve as a springboard to catapult Knowm and AHaH Computing forward.”

Memristors with the bi-directional incremental resistance change property are the foundation for developing learning hardware such as Knowm Inc.’s recently announced Thermodynamic RAM (kT-RAM) and help realize the full potential of AHaH Computing. The availability of kT-RAM will have the largest impact in fields that require higher computational power for machine learning tasks like autonomous robotics, big-data analysis and intelligent Internet assistants. kT-RAM radically increases the efficiency of synaptic integration and adaptation operations by reducing them to physically adaptive ‘analog’ memristor-based circuits. Synaptic integration and adaptation are the core operations behind tasks such as pattern recognition and inference. Knowm Inc. is the first company in the world to bring this technology to market.

Knowm is ushering in the next phase of computing with the first general-purpose neuromemristive processor specification. Earlier this year the company announced the commercial availability of the first products in support of the kT-RAM technology stack. These include the sale of discrete memristor chips, a Back End of Line (BEOL) CMOS+memristor service, the SENSE and Application Servers and their first application named “Knowm Anomaly”, the first application built based on the theory of AHaH Computing and kT-RAM architecture. Knowm also simultaneously announced the company’s visionary developer program for organizations and individual developers. This includes the Knowm API, which serves as development hardware and training resources for co-developing the Knowm technology stack.

Knowm certainly has big ambitions. I’m a little surprised they mentioned IBM rather than HP Labs, which is where researchers first claimed to find evidence of the existence of memristors in 2008 (the story is noted in my Nanotech Mysteries wiki here). As I understand it, HP Labs is working busily (having a missed a few deadlines) on developing a commercial product using memristors.

For the curious, my latest informal roundup of memristor stories is in a May 15, 2015 posting.

Getting back to to Knowm and big ambitions, here’s Alex Nugent, Knowm CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and co-founder talking about the company and its technology,