Collaborative Research: FuSe: A Reconfigurable Ferrolectronics Platform for Collective Computing (FALCON)

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

Digital computing has been the bedrock of the modern information revolution. However, improvements in energy efficiency and reductions in compute costs for digital hardware have decelerated. The impact of this slowdown is felt most acutely when solving computationally challenging problems, such as those in combinatorial optimization (CO), where the computational resources (energy, time, memory) required scale exponentially with problem size. Moreover, such problems find extensive real-world application in fields ranging from artificial intelligence, to autonomous driving, to airline scheduling, to power distribution, creating a practical need to develop new alternative approaches to solving such problems efficiently. Analog dynamical systems such as coupled oscillators offer a promising physics-based approach for solving such hard problems since they exhibit collective properties that are unavailable in digital systems. However, current coupled oscillator platforms address a very limited set of CO problems, exhibit little reconfigurability, and lack the hardware-algorithm ecosystem that made digital computing so successful. Therefore, the goal of this research is to develop a new analog coupled oscillator platform, FALCON, that overcomes these challenges using a cross-cutting effort that spans the development of new oscillator-based computational models to the design of new ferroelectric materials, devices, and circuits for implementing them. The research will enable fundamental advances in analog computing that will subsequently translate to performance improvements for practical applications. Furthermore, to broaden the impact of this work, the team will create an open-source repository of computational models, coupling architectures, and design schemes that will be developed through the course of this project. The team will also focus on workforce development through various activities, such as organizing an industry day, developing new courses, and creating research opportunities for students underrepresented in STEM fields. The coupled oscillator-based FALCON platform developed in this project will offer tailored coupling cores with differentiated phase synchronization dynamics that are specifically engineered such that specific classes of CO problems can be directly mapped and solved in hardware. The proposed paradigm marks a radical departure from the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach used until now, wherein the oscillator synchronization dynamics could only be mapped to a single computational model (e.g., Ising model) that may not always be computationally efficient for the CO problem to be solved. This approach can result in significant pre-processing overhead and entail additional hardware requirements (oscillator nodes) that far exceed the size of the original problem. Moreover, the additional pre-processing and hardware needs can reduce, if not eliminate, any performance advantage of the analog approach, as well as limit its scalability. In contrast, the FALCON coupling cores will offer multiple types of synchronization dynamics, with each core facilitating the mapping of a large number of CO problems directly onto the hardware with minimal overhead. The FALCON platform will be developed through across-the-stack innovation in ferroelectric materials, devices, and mixed-signal circuits, in close conjunction with the advancement of the theoretical foundations of coupled oscillator-based computing. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.