Tag Archives: Priyadarshini Panda

Guide for memristive hardware design

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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.

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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.

Organismic learning—learning to forget

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This approach to mimicking the human brain differs from the memristor. (You can find several pieces about memrisors here including this August 24, 2017 post about a derivative, a neuristor).  This approach comes from scientists at Purdue University and employs a quantum material. From an Aug. 15, 2017 news item on phys.org,

A new computing technology called “organismoids” mimics some aspects of human thought by learning how to forget unimportant memories while retaining more vital ones.

“The human brain is capable of continuous lifelong learning,” said Kaushik Roy, Purdue University’s Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “And it does this partially by forgetting some information that is not critical. I learn slowly, but I keep forgetting other things along the way, so there is a graceful degradation in my accuracy of detecting things that are old. What we are trying to do is mimic that behavior of the brain to a certain extent, to create computers that not only learn new information but that also learn what to forget.”

The work was performed by researchers at Purdue, Rutgers University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory.

Central to the research is a ceramic “quantum material” called samarium nickelate, which was used to create devices called organismoids, said Shriram Ramanathan, a Purdue professor of materials engineering.

A video describing the work has been produced,

An August 14, 2017 Purdue University news release by Emil Venere, which originated the news item,  details the work,

“These devices possess certain characteristics of living beings and enable us to advance new learning algorithms that mimic some aspects of the human brain,” Roy said. “The results have far reaching implications for the fields of quantum materials as well as brain-inspired computing.”

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When exposed to hydrogen gas, the material undergoes a massive resistance change, as its crystal lattice is “doped” by hydrogen atoms. The material is said to breathe, expanding when hydrogen is added and contracting when the hydrogen is removed.

“The main thing about the material is that when this breathes in hydrogen there is a spectacular quantum mechanical effect that allows the resistance to change by orders of magnitude,” Ramanathan said. “This is very unusual, and the effect is reversible because this dopant can be weakly attached to the lattice, so if you remove the hydrogen from the environment you can change the electrical resistance.”

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When hydrogen is exposed to the material, it splits into a proton and an electron, and the electron attaches to the nickel, temporarily causing the material to become an insulator.

“Then, when the hydrogen comes out, this material becomes conducting again,” Ramanathan said. “What we show in this paper is the extent of conduction and insulation can be very carefully tuned.”

This changing conductance and the “decay of that conductance over time” is similar to a key animal behavior called habituation.

“Many animals, even organisms that don’t have a brain, possess this fundamental survival skill,” Roy said. “And that’s why we call this organismic behavior. If I see certain information on a regular basis, I get habituated, retaining memory of it. But if I haven’t seen such information over a long time, then it slowly starts decaying. So, the behavior of conductance going up and down in exponential fashion can be used to create a new computing model that will incrementally learn and at same time forget things in a proper way.”

The researchers have developed a “neural learning model” they have termed adaptive synaptic plasticity.

“This could be really important because it’s one of the first examples of using quantum materials directly for solving a major problem in neural learning,” Ramanathan said.

The researchers used the organismoids to implement the new model for synaptic plasticity.

“Using this effect we are able to model something that is a real problem in neuromorphic computing,” Roy said. “For example, if I have learned your facial features I can still go out and learn someone else’s features without really forgetting yours. However, this is difficult for computing models to do. When learning your features, they can forget the features of the original person, a problem called catastrophic forgetting.”

Neuromorphic computing is not intended to replace conventional general-purpose computer hardware, based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors, or CMOS. Instead, it is expected to work in conjunction with CMOS-based computing. Whereas CMOS technology is especially adept at performing complex mathematical computations, neuromorphic computing might be able to perform roles such as facial recognition, reasoning and human-like decision making.

Roy’s team performed the research work on the plasticity model, and other collaborators concentrated on the physics of how to explain the process of doping-driven change in conductance central to the paper. The multidisciplinary team includes experts in materials, electrical engineering, physics, and algorithms.

“It’s not often that a materials science person can talk to a circuits person like professor Roy and come up with something meaningful,” Ramanathan said.

Organismoids might have applications in the emerging field of spintronics. Conventional computers use the presence and absence of an electric charge to represent ones and zeroes in a binary code needed to carry out computations. Spintronics, however, uses the “spin state” of electrons to represent ones and zeros.

It could bring circuits that resemble biological neurons and synapses in a compact design not possible with CMOS circuits. Whereas it would take many CMOS devices to mimic a neuron or synapse, it might take only a single spintronic device.

In future work, the researchers may demonstrate how to achieve habituation in an integrated circuit instead of exposing the material to hydrogen gas.

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

Habituation based synaptic plasticity and organismic learning in a quantum perovskite by Fan Zuo, Priyadarshini Panda, Michele Kotiuga, Jiarui Li, Mingu Kang, Claudio Mazzoli, Hua Zhou, Andi Barbour, Stuart Wilkins, Badri Narayanan, Mathew Cherukara, Zhen Zhang, Subramanian K. R. S. Sankaranarayanan, Riccardo Comin, Karin M. Rabe, Kaushik Roy, & Shriram Ramanathan. Nature Communications 8, Article number: 240 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00248-6 Published online: 14 August 2017

This paper is open access.