FET: Small: Increasing Robustness, Efficacy, and Capability of CMOS-Compatible Electronic Ising Machines

优化问题在现代社会非常普遍。快速有效地解决这些问题是经济持续增长和可持续发展的关键推动力。长期以来，受物理学启发的算法一直在帮助科学家和工程师解决这些问题。最近，研究人员更进了一步，利用物理过程直接进行“物理计算”。当研究人员最终将这种技术推向市场时，预计对于一些优化问题，专门的硬件可以将速度和能源效率提高数千倍甚至数百万倍。该项目将使研究人员为研究生和本科生提供参与前沿跨学科研究的绝佳机会，并为未来的劳动力做好更好的准备。基于导致该项目的先前工作的基础，该团队的目标是解决一些基本挑战，从而实现一个能够健壮地加速广泛的现实世界问题的物理计算系统。首先，这笔资金将使团队能够构建物理原型，以更好地了解硬件非理想性，从而开发跨层对策，以实现稳健的操作。其次，该项目将首先努力解决容量限制和语义差距，这是伊辛机器面临的两个主要系统级问题。第三，该项目将把伊辛机器扩展到典型问题之外，这有可能将它们从利基解决方案转变为机器学习等关键应用领域的主流平台。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Optimization problems are prevalent in modern societies. Solving them quickly and efficiently is a key enabler for continued economic growth and sustainability. Physics-inspired algorithms have long helped scientists and engineers solve these problems. More recently, researchers have gone one step further and used physical processes to directly perform “physical computation”. When researchers can finally bring such a technology to the marketplace, it is anticipated that for some optimization problems, specialized hardware can improve the speed and energy efficiency by thousands or even millions of times. The project will allow the researchers to provide excellent opportunities for both graduate and under-graduate students to participate in cutting-edge inter-disciplinary research and become better prepared to contribute to the future workforce.Based on the foundation of prior work leading to this project, the goal of the team is to address a number of fundamental challenges so as to bring to fruition a physical computing system that can robustly accelerate a broad class of real-world problems. First, the funding will enable the team to build physical prototypes to better understand hardware non-idealities so as to develop cross-layer countermeasures for robust operation. Second, the project will make the first effort in addressing capacity limits and semantic gaps that are two major system-level issues confronting Ising machines. Third, the project will expand Ising machines beyond canonical problems, which can potentially transform them from a niche solution to a mainstream platform in critical application areas such as machine learning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.