Sunday, April 03, 2022

IBM Researchers Showcase Their Non-Von Neumann AI Hardware Breakthrough in Neuromorphic Computing

The grand daddy of computing Big Blue is back!

"... Although phase change materials have been studied separately for memory and transistor applications, they have never been combined for neuromorphic computing. The team’s research demonstrates how the devices’ non-volatility enables long-term plasticity while volatility enables short-term plasticity. Their combination enables additional mixed-plasticity computations, similar to the mammalian brain. ..."

From the abstract:
"... Hence, in neuromorphic computing platforms, there is a significant need for artificial synapses that can faithfully express such multi-timescale plasticity mechanisms. Although some plasticity rules have been emulated with elaborate complementary metal oxide semiconductor and memristive circuitry, device-level hardware realizations of long-term and short-term plasticity with tunable dynamics are lacking. Here we introduce a phase-change memtransistive synapse that leverages both the non-volatility of the phase configurations and the volatility of field-effect modulation for implementing tunable plasticities. We show that these mixed-plasticity synapses can enable plasticity rules such as short-term spike-timing-dependent plasticity that helps with the modelling of dynamic environments. Further, we demonstrate the efficacy of the memtransistive synapses in realizing accelerators for Hopfield neural networks for solving combinatorial optimization problems."

IBM Researchers Showcase Their Non-Von Neumann AI Hardware Breakthrough in Neuromorphic Computing That Can Help Create Machines To Recognize Objects Just Like Humans - MarkTechPost






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