Scientists have developed a new nanoscale device which could be used to power artificial systems that can mimic the human brain.
The device called a memristor may find applications in pervasive sensing technologies to fuel real-time monitoring in harsh or inaccessible environments; a highly desirable capability for enabling the Internet of Things vision, researchers said.
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) exhibit learning abilities and can perform tasks which are difficult for conventional computing systems, such as pattern recognition, on-line learning, and classification.
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Practical ANN implementations are currently hampered by the lack of efficient hardware synapses; a key component that every ANN requires in large numbers.
Researchers from the University of Southampton in the UK experimentally demonstrated an ANN that used memristor synapses supporting sophisticated learning rules in order to carry out reversible learning of noisy input data.
Memristors are electrical components that limit or regulate the flow of electrical current in a circuit and can remember the amount of charge that was flowing through it and retain the data, even when the power is turned off.
“If we want to build artificial systems that can mimic the brain in function and power we need to use hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions of artificial synapses, many of which must be able to implement learning rules of varying degrees of complexity,” said lead author Dr. Alex Serb, from Southampton.
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“Whilst currently available electronic components can certainly be pieced together to create such synapses, the required power, and area efficiency benchmarks will be extremely difficult to meet without designing new and bespoke ‘synapse components’,” said Serb.
“Memristors offer a possible route towards that end by supporting many fundamental features of learning synapses in extremely compact volumes and at exceptionally low energy costs. If artificial brains are ever going to become reality, therefore, memristive synapses have to succeed,” Serb said.
Acting like synapses in the brain, the metal-oxide memristor array was capable of learning and re-learning input patterns in an unsupervised manner within a probabilistic winner-take-all (WTA) network.
This is useful for enabling low-power embedded processors (needed for the Internet of Things) that can process in real-time big data without any prior knowledge of the data.
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“Our work establishes such a technological paradigm shift, proving that nanoscale memristors can indeed be used to formulate in-silico neural circuits for processing big data in real-time; a key challenge of modern society,” said Themis Prodromakis from Southampton.
“We have shown that such hardware platforms can independently adapt to its environment without any human intervention and are very resilient in processing even noisy data in real-time reliably,” said Prodromakis.
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.