Engineers are operating to design computers accomplished of coping with a tough class of tasks called combinatorial optimization troubles. These demanding situations are imperative to many everyday applications, consisting of telecommunications planning, scheduling, and route optimization for travel.
Recent computing technologies face confront limits on how a great deal processing power can be constructed right into a chip, and the energy needs to train artificial intelligence models is large.
A collaborative group from UCLA and UC Riverside has released a new method to address with those limitations and tackle a number of the toughest optimization problems. Instead of representing all information digitally, their system strategies data by a network of oscillators — components that shift back and forth at defined frequencies. This structure, known as an Ising machine, excels at parallel computing, allowing many calculations to run on the same time. The solution to the hassle is reached when the oscillators fall into synchrony.
Quantum properties at room temperature
In their report released in Physical Review Applied, the researchers described a device that is depends on quantum properties connecting electrical activity with vibrations inside a material. Unlike most ongoing quantum computing procedures, which have to be cooled to highly low temperatures to defend their quantum state, this device can feature at room temperature.
Photo Credit: https://scitechdaily.com/
“Our approach is physics-influence computing, which has lately appeared as a promising technique to resolve complicated optimization issues,” stated corresponding author Alexander Balandin, the Fang Lu Professor of Engineering and prominent professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “It leverages physical phenomena related to strongly correlated electron–phonon condensate to carry out computation via physical technique directly, accordingly gaining more energy efficiency and speed.”
Materials connecting quantum and classical physics
The research showed that oscillators naturally develop to a ground state, wherein they’re synced up, enabling the machine to resolve combinatorial optimization issues.
Balandin and his colleagues used a unique material to bridge the space among quantum mechanics — counterintuitive rules directing interactions between subatomic particles — and the more acquainted physics of everyday life. Their prototype hardware is based on a form of tantalum sulfide, a “quantum material” that makes it feasible to expose the switching between electric and vibrational levels.
The new technology has the capacity for low-power operation; at the same time, it may be well matched with traditional silicon technology.
“Any new physics-primarily based hardware must be incorporated with the same old digital silicon CMOS technology to effect data information processing structures,” stated Balandin, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, or CNSI. “The two-dimensional charge-density-wave material that we selected for this demonstration has the potential for such incorporation.”
