Establishing Electrically Programmable Reaction Arrays as Universal Chemical Computers

本研究建议建立一种新型的混合电可编程化学阵列(EPCA)化学-硅计算体系结构，该体系结构可以处理诸如随机优化(如模拟退火法)等数据密集型计算以及复杂的计算问题。其目的是为化学计算开辟一条新的路线图，以普适计算为目标，针对数学难题。这项工作的愿景是产生一种硅-化学混合处理器。这种可编程化学计算机的开发将通过建立硅-化学混合信息处理体系结构来实现，其中计算发生在化学上，输入来自一组电极，建立在储集层计算领域的新工作的基础上。该系统将由电极阵列编程以驱动电化学过程，输出将由离子敏感场效应晶体管(ISFET)阵列读取。这种双电极传感器系统将用于编程和读出嵌入在电活性凝胶中的氧化还原有源化学振荡器。数字化信息处理将在化学介质中进行，使用氧化还原可配置凝胶来封装和导航广阔的可编程状态空间。这一导航将由一个化学时钟引导，该时钟也将用于纠错。凝胶网络将有助于稳定电编程化学阵列。化学并行处理阵列将作为数字计算机和机器学习系统的基准，摆脱冯·诺伊曼的瓶颈。

This research proposes to create new type of hybrid electrically programmable chemical array (EPCA) chemical-silicon computing architecture that can tackle data intensive computations such as stochastic optimizations, (e.g. simulated annealing), and complex computational problems. The objective is to start a new roadmap for chemical computing targeting universal computation aiming at hard mathematical problems. The vision of this work is to generate a hybrid silicon-chemical-processor. This development of a programmable chemical computer will be achieved by building a hybrid silicon-chemical information processing architecture, where the computations occur chemically, and the inputs come from an array of electrodes, building on nascent work in the area of reservoir computing. The system will be programmed by an electrode array to drive electrochemical processes, and the outputs will be read by arrays of ion sensitive field effect transistors (ISFETs). This dual-electrode-sensor system will be used to both program and read out from a redox active chemical oscillator, embedded in an electroactive gel. The digital information processing will occur in the chemical medium, using the redox-configurable gel to encapsulate and navigate a vast programmable state space. This navigation will be guided by a chemical clock, that will also be used for error correction. The gel network will help stabilize the electrically programmed chemical array. The chemical parallel processing array will be benchmarked as both a digital computer and a machine learning system, liberated from the von Neumann bottleneck.