Future Trends in Microelectronics

2.3

Computing with Coupled Relaxation Oscillators

N. Shukla, S. Datta, A. Parihar and A. Raychowdhury

Department of Electrical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park,, PA, 16802, USA; Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame,, IN, 46556, USA

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta,, GA, 30332, USA

1 Introduction

Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistors supporting the Boolean computational framework have been the backbone of modern computation, and have fueled the information technology revolution for the past four decades. However, there is a class of computing tasks, such as associative processing, which involves the determination of a degree of match (or association) between two quantities in multidimensional space, for which the Boolean approach consumes a significant amount of computing resources. Mathematically, the quantification of the degree of match between two quantities requires the calculation of a distance (using a suitable distance norm) between two points that represents the two quantities in a high-dimensional space. It turns out that the so-called “Boolean bottleneck” arises from the requirement of a significant number of power-intensive multiply–accumulate (MAC) operations involved in the calculation of the distance norm.

Associative computing-based applications such as pattern recognition, visual saliency, and image segmentation are ...