Computing with Heat Using Biocompatible Mott Neurons

Abstract

Heat dissipation is a natural consequence of operating any electronic system. In nearly all of computing, such heat is minimized by design and discarded via cooling, while some post-digital electronics (such as phase-change memories) utilize only the static electrical outcome of such heat dissipation within a single device to represent information. Thus, neither the naturally produced heat energy nor its dynamics are directly used for computing. Here we demonstrate electronic NbOx Mott neurons integrated on a biocompatible flexible organic substrate, designed to exploit both the thermal dynamics of the Mott transition and the dynamics of thermal interactions with the organic substrate, to exhibit 18 bio-mimetic neuronal behaviors and frequency-based nociception (sensing of noxious stimuli) within a single component. Further, multiple Mott neurons can spatiotemporally communicate purely via their thermal dynamics, which we use for graph optimization by consuming over 107× lower energy compared to the best digital processors. Thus, we show that naturally produced heat in electronic systems and its dynamics can be used directly to encode and process information, thereby enabling a higher-complexity energy efficient and radically novel mixed-physics computing primitive.

Reconfigurable Cascaded Thermal Neuristors for Neuromorphic Computing

“…The phenomenon of thermal interactions between spiking oscillators has been previously documented. [43][44][45][46] Leveraging the characteristics of a single neuristor, the pair of thermally coupled neuristors exhibits a diverse range of reconfigurable neural functionalities, which can be tuned by adjusting their input voltages and load resistances.…”