MIT has made a new breakthrough in the field of AI chips.
They used silver-silicon-copper alloys to create memristors to simulate synapses in the human brain.
Chips made with this technology, each chip is only as big as confetti, but there are tens of thousands of memristors per square millimeter, which can "memorize" the high-definition details of the image.
It is the gospel of edge computing. The R&D team also said that this technology will eventually enable portable devices such as mobile phones to have super-computing performance, even with little power consumption and no need for networking.
It can be said to be a superb fingertip, full of imagination.
This research was published in "Nature-Nanotechnology".
Memristor: a transistor that acts as a synapse
The key to this new technology is the memristor.
The memristor is a special type of transistor that researchers use to simulate the synapses in the human nervous system, that is, the part of the connection between two neurons, which is responsible for transmitting the signal of one neuron to the next neuron. go with.
Traditional transistors can only change between 0 and 1, but the memristor does not only have these two states. The value it provides is a gradient change. Therefore, the stronger the signal received, the value of the memristor is also The bigger.
This setting looks very beautiful. The value of a single transistor is no longer only in a binary state, and can change in a gradient, that is, one tops the past N, and the efficiency is greatly improved.
However, the existing memristor is not a particularly mature technology.
The memristor itself has a positive electrode and a negative electrode, with a medium in between. If one pole is connected to electricity, ions will travel through the medium to the other pole.
In the existing memristor, if the voltage is relatively large and the conduction channel is relatively large, the effect of the above-mentioned ion crossing process is relatively good.
But if the current is not large enough and the conductive path is not large enough, the effect is not good enough.
Therefore, in order to make the memristor this powerful transistor work, MIT researchers devised another method of making memristors.
Silver + silicon + copper, memristor +1
So, how can we make a better memristor?
Researchers thought of using alloys.
They used silicon as the negative electrode of the memristor and silver as the positive electrode of the memristor, and then added a small amount of copper.
Copper can be combined with silver or silicon, like a bridge, connecting the silver and silicon ends.
A single memristor was built, and then they put tens of thousands of memristors on a square millimeter silicon chip to form a chip.
Image processing capability
After the chip was built, they used Captain America's picture for testing.
A pixel in the picture is equivalent to a memristor in the chip, and the conductance of each memristor is adjusted according to the color of each pixel.
The third line is the result of this new memristor chip, which can "remember" the image and make it reappear.
In addition, you can also run specific programs to sharpen and blur the image and other various processing methods.