Probability processing circuits
15 September 2010
Analogue, Mixed Signal, LSI
Lyric Semiconductor, a DARPA- and venture-funded MIT spin-out, recently launched a new technology called ‘probability processing,’ which it hopes will deliver a fundamental change in processing performance and power consumption.
With over a decade of development to its name, this probability processing technology calculates in a completely new way, enabling 'orders-of-magnitude improvement in processor efficiency', according to the developers, who claim that Lyric Error Correction (LEC) for Flash memory, the first commercial application of probability processing, offers a 30-times reduction in die size and a 12-times improvement in power consumption, all at higher throughput compared to today’s digital solutions.
Lyric Semiconductor has developed an alternative to digital computing. The company is redesigning processing circuits from the ground up to natively process probabilities – from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language. As a result, many applications that today require a thousand conventional processors will soon run in just one Lyric processor, providing 1000X efficiencies in cost, power, and size.
For over 60 years, computers have been based on digital computing principles. Data is represented as bits and Boolean logic gates perform operations on these bits. Lyric has invented a new kind of logic gate circuit that uses transistors as dimmer switches instead of as on/off switches. These circuits can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities or levels of certainty.
A digital processor steps through these operations serially in order to perform a function. In order to improve efficiency even further, Lyric’s processors are designed to perform many probability computations in parallel. Lyric’s approach can accelerate search, fraud detection, spam filtering, financial modelling, genome sequence analysis, and many other important present and future applications that involve simultaneously considering many possible alternatives and deciding on the best fit – the best guess for the answer. In theory, digital processors can perform these calculations, but in practice, they do so very inefficiently. As a result, a huge amount of processing overhead is required, costing an enormous amount of space, power and money.
For more information visit www.lyricsemiconductor.com
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