Tag Archives: nanoionic device

Wacky oxide. biological synchronicity, and human brainlike computing

Research out of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State, US) has uncovered another approach  to creating artificial brains (more about the other approaches later in this post), from a May 14, 2014 news item on Science Daily,

Current computing is based on binary logic — zeroes and ones — also called Boolean computing. A new type of computing architecture that stores information in the frequencies and phases of periodic signals could work more like the human brain to do computing using a fraction of the energy of today’s computers.

A May 14, 2014 Pennsylvania State University news release, which originated the news item, describes the research in more detail,

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is called a “wacky oxide” because it transitions from a conducting metal to an insulating semiconductor and vice versa with the addition of a small amount of heat or electrical current. A device created by electrical engineers at Penn State uses a thin film of VO2 on a titanium dioxide substrate to create an oscillating switch. Using a standard electrical engineering trick, Nikhil Shukla, a Ph.D. student in the group of Professor Suman Datta and co-advised by Professor Roman Engel-Herbert at Penn State, added a series resistor to the oxide device to stabilize their oscillations over billions of cycles. When Shukla added a second similar oscillating system, he discovered that over time the two devices would begin to oscillate in unison. This coupled system could provide the basis for non-Boolean computing. The results are reported in the May 14 [2014] online issue of Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports.

“It’s called a small-world network,” explained Shukla. “You see it in lots of biological systems, such as certain species of fireflies. The males will flash randomly, but then for some unknown reason the flashes synchronize over time.” The brain is also a small-world network of closely clustered nodes that evolved for more efficient information processing.

“Biological synchronization is everywhere,” added Datta, professor of electrical engineering at Penn State and formerly a Principal Engineer in the Advanced Transistor and Nanotechnology Group at Intel Corporation. “We wanted to use it for a different kind of computing called associative processing, which is an analog rather than digital way to compute.” An array of oscillators can store patterns, for instance, the color of someone’s hair, their height and skin texture. If a second area of oscillators has the same pattern, they will begin to synchronize, and the degree of match can be read out. “They are doing this sort of thing already digitally, but it consumes tons of energy and lots of transistors,” Datta said. Datta is collaborating with co-author and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Vijay Narayanan, in exploring the use of these coupled oscillations in solving visual recognition problems more efficiently than existing embedded vision processors as part of a National Science Foundation Expedition in Computing program.

Shukla and Datta called on the expertise of Cornell University materials scientist Darrell Schlom to make the VO2 thin film, which has extremely high quality similar to single crystal silicon. Georgia Tech computer engineer Arijit Raychowdhury and graduate student Abhinav Parihar mathematically simulated the nonlinear dynamics of coupled phase transitions in the VO2 devices. Parihar created a short video* simulation of the transitions, which occur at a rate close to a million times per second, to show the way the oscillations synchronize. Penn State professor of materials science and engineering Venkatraman Gopalan used the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National laboratory to visually characterize the structural changes occurring in the oxide thin film in the midst of the oscillations.

Datta believes it will take seven to ten years to scale up from their current network of two-three coupled oscillators to the 100 million or so closely packed oscillators required to make a neuromorphic computer chip. One of the benefits of the novel device is that it will use only about one percent of the energy of digital computing, allowing for new ways to design computers. Much work remains to determine if VO2 can be integrated into current silicon wafer technology. “It’s a fundamental building block for a different computing paradigm that is analog rather than digital,” Shukla concluded.

There are two papers being published about this work,

Synchronizing a single-electron shuttle to an external drive by Michael J Moeckel, Darren R Southworth, Eva M Weig, and Florian Marquardt. New J. Phys. 16 043009 doi:10.1088/1367-2630/16/4/043009

Synchronized charge oscillations in correlated electron systems by Nikhil Shukla, Abhinav Parihar, Eugene Freeman, Hanjong Paik, Greg Stone, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Haidan Wen, Zhonghou Cai, Venkatraman Gopalan, Roman Engel-Herbert, Darrell G. Schlom, Arijit Raychowdhury & Suman Datta. Scientific Reports 4, Article number: 4964 doi:10.1038/srep04964 Published 14 May 2014

Both articles are open access.

Finally, the researchers have provided a video animation illustrating their vanadium dioxide switches in action,

As noted earlier, there are other approaches to creating an artificial brain, i.e., neuromorphic engineering. My April 7, 2014 posting is the most recent synopsis posted here; it includes excerpts from a Nanowerk Spotlight article overview along with a mention of the ‘brain jelly’ approach and a discussion of my somewhat extensive coverage of memristors and a mention of work on nanoionic devices. There is also a published roadmap to neuromorphic engineering featuring both analog and digital devices, mentioned in my April 18, 2014 posting.

Synaptic electronics

There’s been a lot about the memristor, being developed at HP Labs, at the University of Michigan, and elsewhere, on this blog and significantly less on other approaches to creating nanodevices with neuromorphic properties by researchers in Japan and in the US. The Dec. 20, 2012 news item on ScienceDaily notes,

Researchers in Japan and the US propose a nanoionic device with a range of neuromorphic and electrical multifunctions that may allow the fabrication of on-demand configurable circuits, analog memories and digital-neural fused networks in one device architecture.

… Now Rui Yang, Kazuya Terabe and colleagues at the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan and the University of California, Los Angeles, in the US have developed two-, three-terminal WO3-x-based nanoionic devices capable of a broad range of neuromorphic and electrical functions.

The originating Dec. 20, 2012 news release from Japan’s International Center for Materials draws a parallel between the device’s properties and neural behaviour,  explains the ‘why’ of the process, and mentions what applications the researchers believe could be developed,

The researchers draw similarities between the device properties — volatile and non-volatile states and the current fading process following positive voltage pulses — with models for neural behaviour —that is, short- and long-term memory and forgetting processes. They explain the behaviour as the result of oxygen ions migrating within the device in response to the voltage sweeps. Accumulation of the oxygen ions at the electrode leads to Schottky-like potential barriers and the resulting changes in resistance and rectifying characteristics. The stable bipolar switching behaviour at the Pt/WO3-x interface is attributed to the formation of the electric conductive filament and oxygen absorbability of the Pt electrode.

As the researchers conclude, “These capabilities open a new avenue for circuits, analog memories, and artificially fused digital neural networks using on-demand programming by input pulse polarity, magnitude, and repetition history.”

For those who wish to delve more deeply, here’s the citation (from the ScienceDaily news item),

Rui Yang, Kazuya Terabe, Guangqiang Liu, Tohru Tsuruoka, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, James K. Gimzewski, Masakazu Aono. On-Demand Nanodevice with Electrical and Neuromorphic Multifunction Realized by Local Ion Migration. ACS Nano, 2012; 6 (11): 9515 DOI: 10.1021/nn302510e

The news release does not state explicitly why this would be considered an on-demand device. The article is behind a paywall.

There was a recent attempt to mimic brain processing not based in nanoelectronics but on mimicking brain activity by creating virtual neurons. A Canadian team at the University of Waterloo led by Chris Eliasmith made a sensation  with SPAUN (Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network) in late Nov. 2012 (mentioned in my Nov. 29, 2012 posting).