Tag Archives: Suman Datta

Guide for memristive hardware design

An August 15 ,2022 news item on ScienceDaily announces a type of guide for memristive hardware design,

They are many times faster than flash memory and require significantly less energy: memristive memory cells could revolutionize the energy efficiency of neuromorphic [brainlike] computers. In these computers, which are modeled on the way the human brain works, memristive cells function like artificial synapses. Numerous groups around the world are working on the use of corresponding neuromorphic circuits — but often with a lack of understanding of how they work and with faulty models. Jülich researchers have now summarized the physical principles and models in a comprehensive review article in the renowned journal Advances in Physics.

An August 15, 2022 Forschungszentrum Juelich press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes two papers designed to help researchers better understand and design memristive hardware,

Certain tasks – such as recognizing patterns and language – are performed highly efficiently by a human brain, requiring only about one ten-thousandth of the energy of a conventional, so-called “von Neumann” computer. One of the reasons lies in the structural differences: In a von Neumann architecture, there is a clear separation between memory and processor, which requires constant moving of large amounts of data. This is time and energy consuming – the so-called von Neumann bottleneck. In the brain, the computational operation takes place directly in the data memory and the biological synapses perform the tasks of memory and processor at the same time.

In Jülich, scientists have been working for more than 15 years on special data storage devices and components that can have similar properties to the synapses in the human brain. So-called memristive memory devices, also known as memristors, are considered to be extremely fast, energy-saving and can be miniaturized very well down to the nanometer range. The functioning of memristive cells is based on a very special effect: Their electrical resistance is not constant, but can be changed and reset again by applying an external voltage, theoretically continuously. The change in resistance is controlled by the movement of oxygen ions. If these move out of the semiconducting metal oxide layer, the material becomes more conductive and the electrical resistance drops. This change in resistance can be used to store information.

The processes that can occur in cells are very complex and vary depending on the material system. Three researchers from the Jülich Peter Grünberg Institute – Prof. Regina Dittmann, Dr. Stephan Menzel, and Prof. Rainer Waser – have therefore compiled their research results in a detailed review article, “Nanoionic memristive phenomena in metal oxides: the valence change mechanism”. They explain in detail the various physical and chemical effects in memristors and shed light on the influence of these effects on the switching properties of memristive cells and their reliability.

“If you look at current research activities in the field of neuromorphic memristor circuits, they are often based on empirical approaches to material optimization,” said Rainer Waser, director at the Peter Grünberg Institute. “Our goal with our review article is to give researchers something to work with in order to enable insight-driven material optimization.” The team of authors worked on the approximately 200-page article for ten years and naturally had to keep incorporating advances in knowledge.

“The analogous functioning of memristive cells required for their use as artificial synapses is not the normal case. Usually, there are sudden jumps in resistance, generated by the mutual amplification of ionic motion and Joule heat,” explains Regina Dittmann of the Peter Grünberg Institute. “In our review article, we provide researchers with the necessary understanding of how to change the dynamics of the cells to enable an analog operating mode.”

“You see time and again that groups simulate their memristor circuits with models that don’t take into account high dynamics of the cells at all. These circuits will never work.” said Stephan Menzel, who leads modeling activities at the Peter Grünberg Institute and has developed powerful compact models that are now in the public domain (www.emrl.de/jart.html). “In our review article, we provide the basics that are extremely helpful for a correct use of our compact models.”

Roadmap neuromorphic computing

The “Roadmap of Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering”, which was published in May 2022, shows how neuromorphic computing can help to reduce the enormous energy consumption of IT globally. In it, researchers from the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-7), together with leading experts in the field, have compiled the various technological possibilities, computational approaches, learning algorithms and fields of application. 

According to the study, applications in the field of artificial intelligence, such as pattern recognition or speech recognition, are likely to benefit in a special way from the use of neuromorphic hardware. This is because they are based – much more so than classical numerical computing operations – on the shifting of large amounts of data. Memristive cells make it possible to process these gigantic data sets directly in memory without transporting them back and forth between processor and memory. This could reduce the energy efficiency of artificial neural networks by orders of magnitude.

Memristive cells can also be interconnected to form high-density matrices that enable neural networks to learn locally. This so-called edge computing thus shifts computations from the data center to the factory floor, the vehicle, or the home of people in need of care. Thus, monitoring and controlling processes or initiating rescue measures can be done without sending data via a cloud. “This achieves two things at the same time: you save energy, and at the same time, personal data and data relevant to security remain on site,” says Prof. Dittmann, who played a key role in creating the roadmap as editor.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the ‘roadmap’,

2022 roadmap on neuromorphic computing and engineering by Dennis V Christensen, Regina Dittmann, Bernabe Linares-Barranco, Abu Sebastian, Manuel Le Gallo, Andrea Redaelli, Stefan Slesazeck, Thomas Mikolajick, Sabina Spiga, Stephan Menzel, Ilia Valov, Gianluca Milano, Carlo Ricciardi, Shi-Jun Liang, Feng Miao, Mario Lanza, Tyler J Quill, Scott T Keene, Alberto Salleo, Julie Grollier, Danijela Marković, Alice Mizrahi, Peng Yao, J Joshua Yang, Giacomo Indiveri, John Paul Strachan, Suman Datta, Elisa Vianello, Alexandre Valentian, Johannes Feldmann, Xuan Li, Wolfram H P Pernice, Harish Bhaskaran, Steve Furber, Emre Neftci, Franz Scherr, Wolfgang Maass, Srikanth Ramaswamy, Jonathan Tapson, Priyadarshini Panda, Youngeun Kim, Gouhei Tanaka, Simon Thorpe, Chiara Bartolozzi, Thomas A Cleland, Christoph Posch, ShihChii Liu, Gabriella Panuccio, Mufti Mahmud, Arnab Neelim Mazumder, Morteza Hosseini, Tinoosh Mohsenin, Elisa Donati, Silvia Tolu, Roberto Galeazzi, Martin Ejsing Christensen, Sune Holm, Daniele Ielmini and N Pryds. Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering , Volume 2, Number 2 DOI: 10.1088/2634-4386/ac4a83 20 May 2022 • © 2022 The Author(s)

This paper is open access.

Here’s the most recent paper,

Nanoionic memristive phenomena in metal oxides: the valence change mechanism by Regina Dittmann, Stephan Menzel & Rainer Waser. Advances in Physics
Volume 70, 2021 – Issue 2 Pages 155-349 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00018732.2022.2084006 Published online: 06 Aug 2022

This paper is behind a paywall.

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.