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Novel Hardware for Unconventional Computing

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Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

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Natural systems give us examples of amorphous, unstructured devices, capable of fault-tolerant information processing, particularly with regard to the massive parallel spatial problems that digital processors have difficulty with. For example, reaction-diffusion (RD) chemical systems have the unique ability to efficiently solve combinatorial problems with natural parallelism (Adamatzky 2001). In liquid-phase parallel RD processors (RD chemical computers), both the data and the results of the computation are encoded as concentration profiles of the reagents. The computation is performed via the spreading and interaction of the wave fronts. In experimental chemical processors, data are represented by local disturbances in the concentrations, and computation is accomplished via the interaction of waves caused by the local disturbances.

The RD chemical computers operate in parallel since the chemical medium’s micro-volumes update their states simultaneously, and...

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Abbreviations

Analog circuit :

An electronic circuit that operates with currents and voltages that vary continuously with time and have no abrupt transitions between levels. Since most physical quantities, e.g., velocity and temperature, vary continuously, as does audio, an analog circuit provides the best means of representing them.

Current mirror :

A circuit that copies single input current to single (or multiple) output nodes. Two types of current mirrors exist: nMOS for current sinks and pMOS for current sources. Combining both types of current mirrors, one can invert a direction of currents, e.g., sink to source or source to sink.

Digital circuit :

An electronic circuit that can take on only a finite number of states. Binary (two-state) digital circuits are the most common. The two possible states of a binary circuit are represented by the binary digits, or bits, 0 and 1. The simplest forms of digital circuits are built from logic gates, the building blocks of the digital computer.

Diode :

A device that allows current flow only in one direction. Chemical diode allows for propagation of chemical waves only in one direction.

Flip-flop circuit :

A synchronous bistable device where the output changes state only when the clock input is triggered. That is, changes in the output occur in synchronization with the clock.

Floating-gate transistor :

A device consisting of a control gate, floating gate, and the thin oxide layer; when floating gate is given an electrical charge, the charge is trapped in the insulating thin oxide layer. The transistors are used as nonvolatile storage devices because they store electrical charge for a long time without powering.

LSI, large-scale integrated circuit :

An electronic circuit built on a semiconductor substrate, usually one of single-crystal silicon. It contains from 100 to 1,000 transistors. Some LSI circuits are analog devices; an operational amplifier is an example. Other LSI circuits, such as the microprocessors used in computers, are digital devices.

Minority-carrier transport :

A physical phenomenon in forwardly biased semiconductor p-n junctions. Minority carriers are generated in both areas of p- and n-type semiconductors. For p-type semiconductors, the minority carriers are electrons, while they are holes in n-type semiconductors. Once minority carriers are generated, they diffuse among the semiconductor and finally disappear by the recombination of electrons and holes.

nMOS FET :

Abbreviation of n-type metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor, where semiconductor is negatively charged so the transistors are controlled by movement of electrons; these transistors have three modes of operation: cutoff, triode, and saturation (active).

pMOS FET :

A device which works by analogy to nMOS FET, but the transistors are moved on and off by movement of electron vacancies.

Single-electron circuit :

An electrical circuit that is functionally constructed by controlling movements of single electrons. Single-electron circuit consists of tunneling junctions, and electrons are controlled by using physical phenomena called the Coulomb blockade.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

    Tetsuya Asai

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  1. Tetsuya Asai
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Correspondence to Tetsuya Asai .

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  1. Ramtech Ltd., Larkspur, California, USA

    Robert A. Meyers

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Asai, T. (2015). Novel Hardware for Unconventional Computing. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_575-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_575-3

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