Sun Zhong, Pedretti Giacomo, Ambrosi Elia, Bricalli Alessandro, Wang Wei, Ielmini Daniele
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy.
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Mar 5;116(10):4123-4128. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1815682116. Epub 2019 Feb 19.
Conventional digital computers can execute advanced operations by a sequence of elementary Boolean functions of 2 or more bits. As a result, complicated tasks such as solving a linear system or solving a differential equation require a large number of computing steps and an extensive use of memory units to store individual bits. To accelerate the execution of such advanced tasks, in-memory computing with resistive memories provides a promising avenue, thanks to analog data storage and physical computation in the memory. Here, we show that a cross-point array of resistive memory devices can directly solve a system of linear equations, or find the matrix eigenvectors. These operations are completed in just one single step, thanks to the physical computing with Ohm's and Kirchhoff's laws, and thanks to the negative feedback connection in the cross-point circuit. Algebraic problems are demonstrated in hardware and applied to classical computing tasks, such as ranking webpages and solving the Schrödinger equation in one step.
传统数字计算机可以通过一系列两位或更多位的基本布尔函数来执行高级运算。因此，诸如求解线性系统或求解微分方程等复杂任务需要大量的计算步骤，并广泛使用存储单元来存储单个比特。为了加速此类高级任务的执行，基于电阻式存储器的内存计算提供了一条很有前景的途径，这得益于内存中的模拟数据存储和物理计算。在此，我们展示了一个电阻式存储器件的交叉点阵列可以直接求解线性方程组，或找到矩阵特征向量。由于利用欧姆定律和基尔霍夫定律进行物理计算，以及交叉点电路中的负反馈连接，这些运算只需一步即可完成。代数问题在硬件中得到了演示，并应用于经典计算任务，如对网页进行排名和一步求解薛定谔方程。
