For over half a century, the semiconductor industry has made remarkable contributions to benefit human beings globally. Its phenomenal progress through technology scaling has made unimaginable things a reality and Moore’s law has served as a must-do marching order. However, the semiconductor industry has been aware of the ending of Moore's law and the limitation of the von Neumann architecture, especially in view of the power bottleneck and energy efficiency. In the meantime, applications of artificial intelligence (AI) have outpaced Moore’s law in chip development, thus creating an increasingly larger gap between the user demand and the supply the semiconductor industry can attain.
In this talk, we will discuss unique roles of memristor technology that can be leveraged in developing upscaled AI neural networks. Biologically inspired, spiking neural networks (SNNs) can perform brain-like neuromorphic computing, and unsupervised learning with high energy efficiency. There are many unknowns about the human brain, but for any electronic system to mimic the brain functions, open-source memristor circuit designs, like the open-source software, are much needed. In this venue, we will discuss how to harness new materials and devices to build memristor neurons, synapses, and their interconnects for ultra-high packing density, low power consumption, and necessary fabrication service as an innovation enabler.
A new memristor neuron model, memristive integrated and fire (MIF) circuit, will be introduced as a most compact physical realization of biological neurons. We project that the astronomical number of memristor neurons and synapses, as many as those in a median-size human brain, can be monolithically integrated, in a form of 2D or 3D integration, at a CMOS-memristor technology node of 3.5 nm or less, to mimic many functions of the human brain in the surface area of 2400 ?cm?^2 and a total power consumption in the ballpark of 20W.
|