MemCA: All-Memristor Design for Deterministic and Probabilistic Cellular Automata Hardware Realization

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Vasileios Ntinas - , Chair of Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering, UPC Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona Tech), Democritus University of Thrace (Author)
  • Iosif Angelos Fyrigos - , Democritus University of Thrace (Author)
  • Rafailia Eleni Karamani - , Democritus University of Thrace (Author)
  • Nikolaos Vasileiadis - , Democritus University of Thrace (Author)
  • Panagiotis Dimitrakis - , Demokritos National Centre for Scientific Research (Author)
  • Antonio Rubio - , UPC Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona Tech) (Author)
  • Georgios Ch Sirakoulis - , Democritus University of Thrace (Author)

Abstract

Inspired by the behavior of natural systems, Cellular Automata (CA) tackle the demanding long-distance information transfer of conventional computers by the massive parallel computation performed by a set of locally-coupled dynamical nodes. Although CA are envisioned as powerful deterministic computers, their intrinsic capabilities are expanded after the memristor's probabilistic switching is introduced into CA cells, resulting in new hybrid deterministic and probabilistic memristor-based CA (MemCA). In the proposed MemCA hardware realization, memristor devices are incorporated in both the cell and rule modules, composing the very first all-memristor CA hardware, designed with mixed CMOS/Memristor circuits. The proposed implementation accomplishes high operating speed and reduced area requirements, exploiting also memristor as an entropy source in every CA cell. MemCA's functioning is showcased in deterministic and probabilistic operation, which can be externally modified by the selection of programming voltage amplitude, without changing the design. Also, the proposed MemCA system includes a reconfigurable rule module implementation that allows for spatial and temporal rule inhomogeneity.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)45782-45797
Number of pages16
JournalIEEE access
Volume11
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

WOS 000991571100001
dblp journals/access/NtinasFKVDRS23
Mendeley 85271334-f70c-3fb4-b8e7-a14002674a6a

Keywords

Keywords

  • Automata, Cellular Automata, CMOS technology, emergent computing hardware, Field programmable gate arrays, Hardware, hybrid CMOS/memristor design, Memristor technology, Memristors, Probabilistic logic, Semiconductor device modeling, Task analysis, Cellular automata, Memristor design, Emergent computing hardware, hybrid CMOS, cellular automata