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HIGHER SPEED AND LOWER CONSUMPTION

They invent a revolutionary circuit that works like the brain

The new circuit is an organic-metallic molecule of 77 atoms that simultaneously acts as a memory and a processor, like neurons.

Illustration of dendrites of the brain

By

Jesus Diaz

09/06/2021 - 05:00

Phones, laptops, supercomputers ... everything could change radically in a few years thanks to a new type of molecular circuit that eliminates the biggest problem in today's computers, achieving power and fault tolerance comparable to that of the human brain with minimal use of energy. .

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The big problem that limits the power of any modern computer is its own architecture. Roughly, a machine has a central processor in charge of performing operations with data that comes from memory. This architecture - called von Neumann or Princeton - is inevitably limited by the communication channel between processor and memory. Every time a program has to execute an instruction, the processor has to access data in memory, process it, and send it back to memory.

This causes a bottleneck - calling von Neumann - which is physically impossible to solve and can only be partially alleviated with different tricks, such as buffers built into the processor or process predictors that save a small part of the access to the main memory of the computer. system.

Now, in a study published in the scientific journal Nature, an international group of engineers from Ireland, the United States, India and Singapore claim that their new circuit completely destroys the von Neumann bottleneck. It is a new type of architecture capable of simultaneously storing and processing information , as the human brain does.

How does it work

This circuit is called a 'memristor', a fusion of memory and transistor. It is not a new concept. It was first proposed in 1971 at the theoretical level but no one has been able to get it beyond the laboratory. All the experimental designs operated in a very limited temperature range and could only be made with extremely rare and expensive elements , such as niobium and vanadium.

But this new design removes those limitations. It is an organic-metallic molecule of 77 atoms. The molecule has the ability to consistently store data but also process it with a logical tree of instructions similar to the dendrites of neurons.

This logical tree exhibits the same neuroplastic properties of the brain: it can basically change configuration as needed, exposing it to different voltage levels.

An experimental prototype memristor manufactured by the US Department of Energy

Sreetosh Goswami, one of the authors of the study, says that the molecule exhibits "a flexibility and adaptability similar to the connectors of the human brain." Your memristor can be “instantly reconfigured for different computational functions simply by changing the applied voltages. Also, just as nerve cells store data, the same device can store information for future access and processing. " Goswami was the one who found the key in the manufacture of the material to build this memristor, which consists of an iron molecule in its central part linked to organic molecules.

Their processing power is such that the team couldn't believe their data. According to Goswami, it is extraordinary: “our device was doing something like the brain does but in a different way. When you learn something new or are deciding something, the brain reconfigures itself and changes its physical 'wiring'. Similarly, we can logically reprogram or reconfigure our devices using different voltage pulses ”.

Unimaginable speed

According to the inventors of the new memristor, its architecture also allows multiple data to be processed simultaneously using its instantly reconfigurable instruction tree. In fact, they claim that their memsistor has such processing power that one of these molecules can replace thousands of transistors in a traditional processor.

The memsistor can be connected in parallel with others to obtain a process speed previously unknown. The team also claims that because of the way it operates, it is resilient to failure. And since everything - processing and data storage - is carried out in the same nanoscopic circuit, the consumption and time savings have no equivalent in the current industry.

Thompson holding the magic molecule that makes up the memristor

Another of the study's authors - Damien Thompson, in the image above these lines - assures that they are “very excited about the possibilities because these devices show all the characteristics of brain computing. First, a gigantic number of tiny identical molecular network processors work in parallel [like neurons]. Even more importantly, they are redundant and reconfigurable, which means that a device can solve problems even if its individual components do not work perfectly or in the same way at all times ”.

As always with all these kinds of cutting-edge developments, you'll have to wait and see how long it takes to get to market. But it is clear that, just when we are about to reach the limit of computing traditional architectures, we now have two interesting new avenues open: quantum computing technology and this new type of circuitry that emulates the behavior of the most advanced computer. that we know: the human brain.