Wave-Based Memristive Devices and Circuits for Classical and non von Neumann Information Processing

During recent years there is a growing concern regarding the future of CMOS technology, since its growth rate has begun to decline. Moreover, the future of silicon transistors seems to be uncertain, as the magnitude of the transistor reaches few nm and new, perhaps unresolved, problems arise, such as the very large production costs, the leakage of electrical power, the high energy consumption, the credibility of the devices and the approach of the physical limits of this technology. At the same time, the corresponding classical (von Neumman) computing systems are also plagued by the problems of memory wall and energy wall and, consequently, the search for new computing approaches is heavily investigared.

W-MEMPRO project aims to successfully deal with the aforementioned issues introducing the development of an analogue hybrid computational circuit-level system, using innovative nanoelectronic devices, namely memristors (memory resistors), inspired by the biochemical processes occurring in nature and based on the corresponding wave propagation. The main purpose of W-MEMPRO is based on the propagation of electrochemical waves in nature and the resulting executing controlled processes capable of successfully performing computations, to design, model and fabricate memristor devices utilized for the design and development of wave based electronic computational units. The proposed nanoelectronic circuits will be able to perform both classical (Boolean) and non-conventional (multi-digit, in memory and neuromorphic) calculations, targeting beyond the existing von Neumann information processing.

Thus W-MEMPRO, thanks to the memristor, will provide an advanced approach comparable and even more efficient than the current conventional computing systems in terms of energy consumption, while maintaining the integration scale, ensuring the co-existence of memory and processing unit in the same physical location and offering, through crossbar, full parallelism. Finally, W-MEMPRO envisions the realization of a completely analog, universal computing unit of emergent computation enriched with wave based reprogrammability.