Forward stagewise regression with multilevel memristor for sparse coding

Sparse coding is a prevalent method for image inpainting and feature extraction,which can repair corrupted images or improve data processing efficiency,and has numerous applications in computer vision and signal processing.Recently,sev-eral memristor-based in-memory computing systems have been proposed to enhance the efficiency of sparse coding remark-ably.However,the variations and low precision of the devices will deteriorate the dictionary,causing inevitable degradation in the accuracy and reliability of the application.In this work,a digital-analog hybrid memristive sparse coding system is pro-posed utilizing a multilevel Pt/Al_(2)O_(3)/AlO_(x)/W memristor,which employs the forward stagewise regression algorithm:The approxi-mate cosine distance calculation is conducted in the analog part to speed up the computation,followed by high-precision coeffi-cient updates performed in the digital portion.We determine that four states of the aforementioned memristor are sufficient for the processing of natural images.Furthermore,through dynamic adjustment of the mapping ratio,the precision require-ment for the digit-to-analog converters can be reduced to 4 bits.Compared to the previous system,our system achieves higher image reconstruction quality of the 38 dB peak-signal-to-noise ratio.Moreover,in the context of image inpainting,images containing 50%missing pixels can be restored with a reconstruction error of 0.0424 root-mean-squared error.

Multiply accumulate operations in memristor crossbar arrays for analog computing

Memristors are now becoming a prominent candidate to serve as the building blocks of non-von Neumann inmemory computing architectures.By mapping analog numerical matrices into memristor crossbar arrays,efficient multiply accumulate operations can be performed in a massively parallel fashion using the physics mechanisms of Ohm’s law and Kirchhoff’s law.In this brief review,we present the recent progress in two niche applications:neural network accelerators and numerical computing units,mainly focusing on the advances in hardware demonstrations.The former one is regarded as soft computing since it can tolerant some degree of the device and array imperfections.The acceleration of multiple layer perceptrons,convolutional neural networks,generative adversarial networks,and long short-term memory neural networks are described.The latter one is hard computing because the solving of numerical problems requires high-precision devices.Several breakthroughs in memristive equation solvers with improved computation accuracies are highlighted.Besides,other nonvolatile devices with the capability of analog computing are also briefly introduced.Finally,we conclude the review with discussions on the challenges and opportunities for future research toward realizing memristive analog computing machines.

Toward memristive in-memory computing:principles and applications

With the rapid growth of computer science and big data,the traditional von Neumann architecture suffers the aggravating data communication costs due to the separated structure of the processing units and memories.Memristive in-memory computing paradigm is considered as a prominent candidate to address these issues,and plentiful applications have been demonstrated and verified.These applications can be broadly categorized into two major types:soft computing that can tolerant uncertain and imprecise results,and hard computing that emphasizes explicit and precise numerical results for each task,leading to different requirements on the computational accuracies and the corresponding hardware solutions.In this review,we conduct a thorough survey of the recent advances of memristive in-memory computing applications,both on the soft computing type that focuses on artificial neural networks and other machine learning algorithms,and the hard computing type that includes scientific computing and digital image processing.At the end of the review,we discuss the remaining challenges and future opportunities of memristive in-memory computing in the incoming Artificial Intelligence of Things era.

Self-selective memristor-enabled in-memory search for highly efficient data mining

Similarity search,that is,finding similar items in massive data,is a fundamental computing problem in many fields such as data mining and information retrieval.However,for large-scale and high-dimension data,it suffers from high computational complexity,requiring tremendous computation resources.Here,based on the low-power self-selective memristors,for the first time,we propose an in-memory search(IMS)system with two innovative designs.First,by exploiting the natural distribution law of the devices resistance,a hardware locality sensitive hashing encoder has been designed to transform the realvalued vectors into more efficient binary codes.Second,a compact memristive ternary content addressable memory is developed to calculate the Hamming distances between the binary codes in parallel.Our IMS system demonstrated a 168energy efficiency improvement over all-transistors counterparts in clustering and classification tasks,while achieving a software-comparable accuracy,thus providing a low-complexity and low-power solution for in-memory data mining applications.