ON-OFF neuromorphic ISING machines using Fowler-Nordheim annealers

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Zihao Chen - , Washington University St. Louis (Author)
  • Zhili Xiao - , Washington University St. Louis (Author)
  • Mahmoud Akl - , SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH (Author)
  • Johannes Leugring - , University of California at San Diego (Author)
  • Omowuyi Olajide - , University of California at San Diego (Author)
  • Adil Malik - , Imperial College London (Author)
  • Nik Dennler - , Western Sydney University, University of Hertfordshire (Author)
  • Chad Harper - , University of California at Berkeley (Author)
  • Subhankar Bose - , Washington University St. Louis (Author)
  • Hector A. Gonzalez - , Chair of Highly-Parallel VLSI Systems and Neuro-Microelectronics, SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH (Author)
  • Mohamed Samaali - , SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH (Author)
  • Gengting Liu - , SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH (Author)
  • Jason Eshraghian - , University of California at Santa Cruz (Author)
  • Riccardo Pignari - , Polytechnic University of Turin (Author)
  • Gianvito Urgese - , Polytechnic University of Turin (Author)
  • Andreas G. Andreou - , Johns Hopkins University (Author)
  • Sadasivan Shankar - , SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford Engineering (Author)
  • Christian Mayr - , Chair of Highly-Parallel VLSI Systems and Neuro-Microelectronics, Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI Dresden) (Author)
  • Gert Cauwenberghs - , University of California at San Diego (Author)
  • Shantanu Chakrabartty - , Washington University St. Louis (Author)

Abstract

We introduce NeuroSA, a neuromorphic architecture specifically designed to ensure asymptotic convergence to the ground state of an Ising problem using a Fowler-Nordheim quantum mechanical tunneling based threshold-annealing process. The core component of NeuroSA consists of a pair of asynchronous ON-OFF neurons, which effectively map classical simulated annealing dynamics onto a network of integrate-and-fire neurons. The threshold of each ON-OFF neuron pair is adaptively adjusted by an FN annealer and the resulting spiking dynamics replicates the optimal escape mechanism and convergence of SA, particularly at low-temperatures. To validate the effectiveness of our neuromorphic Ising machine, we systematically solved benchmark combinatorial optimization problems such as MAX-CUT and Max Independent Set. Across multiple runs, NeuroSA consistently generates distribution of solutions that are concentrated around the state-of-the-art results (within 99%) or surpass the current state-of-the-art solutions for Max Independent Set benchmarks. Furthermore, NeuroSA is able to achieve these superior distributions without any graph-specific hyperparameter tuning. For practical illustration, we present results from an implementation of NeuroSA on the SpiNNaker2 platform, highlighting the feasibility of mapping our proposed architecture onto a standard neuromorphic accelerator platform.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number3086
JournalNature communications
Volume16
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

PubMed 40164601