New research from North Carolina State University has found that combining digital and analog components in nonlinear, chaos-based integrated circuits can improve their computational power by enabling processing of a larger number of inputs. This “best of both worlds” approach could lead to circuits that can perform more computations without increasing their physical size.
Computer scientists and designers are struggling to keep up with Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years in order to meet processing demands. They are rapidly reaching the limits of physics in terms of transistor size – it isn’t possible to continue shrinking the transistors to fit more on a chip.
New research from North Carolina State University has found that combining digital and analog components in nonlinear, chaos-based integrated circuits can improve their computational power by enabling processing of a larger number of inputs. This “best of both worlds” approach could lead to circuits that can perform more computations without increasing their physical size.
Computer scientists and designers are struggling to keep up with Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years in order to meet processing demands. They are rapidly reaching the limits of physics in terms of transistor size – it isn’t possible to continue shrinking the transistors to fit more on a chip.
Chaos-based, nonlinear circuits have been proposed as a solution to the problem, as one circuit can perform multiple computations instead of the current “one circuit, one task” design. However, the number of inputs that can be processed in chaos-based computing is limited by ambient noise, which decreases accuracy. Ambient noise refers to random signal fluctuations that can be caused by temperature variations, voltage fluctuations or semiconductor defects.
“Noise has always been a big problem in almost all engineering applications including computing devices and communications,” says Vivek Kohar, postdoctoral research scholar at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the work. “Our system is nonlinear and so noise can be even more problematic.”
Continue reading at North Carolina State University
