Tag Archives: Hopfield neural network

Mott memristor

Mott memristors (mentioned in my Aug. 24, 2017 posting about neuristors and brainlike computing) gets more fulsome treatment in an Oct. 9, 2017 posting by Samuel K. Moore on the Nanoclast blog (found on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) Note: 1: Links have been removed; Note 2 : I quite like Moore’s writing style but he’s not for the impatient reader,

When you’re really harried, you probably feel like your head is brimful of chaos. You’re pretty close. Neuroscientists say your brain operates in a regime termed the “edge of chaos,” and it’s actually a good thing. It’s a state that allows for fast, efficient analog computation of the kind that can solve problems that grow vastly more difficult as they become bigger in size.

The trouble is, if you’re trying to replicate that kind of chaotic computation with electronics, you need an element that both acts chaotically—how and when you want it to—and could scale up to form a big system.

“No one had been able to show chaotic dynamics in a single scalable electronic device,” says Suhas Kumar, a researcher at Hewlett Packard Labs, in Palo Alto, Calif. Until now, that is.

He, John Paul Strachan, and R. Stanley Williams recently reported in the journal Nature that a particular configuration of a certain type of memristor contains that seed of controlled chaos. What’s more, when they simulated wiring these up into a type of circuit called a Hopfield neural network, the circuit was capable of solving a ridiculously difficult problem—1,000 instances of the traveling salesman problem—at a rate of 10 trillion operations per second per watt.

(It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the world’s most powerful supercomputer as of June 2017 managed 93,015 trillion floating point operations per second but consumed 15 megawatts doing it. So about 6 billion operations per second per watt.)

The device in question is called a Mott memristor. Memristors generally are devices that hold a memory, in the form of resistance, of the current that has flowed through them. The most familiar type is called resistive RAM (or ReRAM or RRAM, depending on who’s asking). Mott memristors have an added ability in that they can also reflect a temperature-driven change in resistance.

The HP Labs team made their memristor from an 8-nanometer-thick layer of niobium dioxide (NbO2) sandwiched between two layers of titanium nitride. The bottom titanium nitride layer was in the form of a 70-nanometer wide pillar. “We showed that this type of memristor can generate chaotic and nonchaotic signals,” says Williams, who invented the memristor based on theory by Leon Chua.

(The traveling salesman problem is one of these. In it, the salesman must find the shortest route that lets him visit all of his customers’ cities, without going through any of them twice. It’s a difficult problem because it becomes exponentially more difficult to solve with each city you add.)

Here’s what the niobium dioxide-based Mott memristor looks like,

Photo: Suhas Kumar/Hewlett Packard Labs
A micrograph shows the construction of a Mott memristor composed of an 8-nanometer-thick layer of niobium dioxide between two layers of titanium nitride.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Chaotic dynamics in nanoscale NbO2 Mott memristors for analogue computing by Suhas Kumar, John Paul Strachan & R. Stanley Williams. Nature 548, 318–321 (17 August 2017) doi:10.1038/nature23307 Published online: 09 August 2017

This paper is behind a paywall.