Computational Nanoelectronics and Emerging Devices Group
CNEG’s research is focused on the theoretical and computational investigation of device science and engineering based on nanoelectronics, spintronics, and advanced materials, with an emphasis on low-power consumption applications and nonvolatile electronic system. The research topics are engaged in a dynamic and multidisciplinary research program requiring (1) fundamental understanding of materials to discover original and unique properties and their affects on carrier, spin and heat transport, and (2) a creative engineering approach to innovate and realize novel devices. The studied devices widely include the electronic, thermoelectric, optoelectronic, electron-optics, magnetic, and spintronic devices. Many of our theoretical predictions have been confirmed by experimental measurements.
Latest news
The paper "Many-Body Effects-Based Invertible Logic with a Simple Energy Landscape and High Accuracy" by Yihan He, Chao Fang, Sheng Luo, Gengchiau Liang* is published in IEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits.
Inspired by many-body effects, we propose a novel design for Boltzmann machine (BM)-based invertible logic (IL) using probabilistic bits (p-bits). A CMOS-based XNOR gate is derived to serve as the hardware implementation of many-body interactions, and an IL family is built based on this design. Compared to the conventional two-body-based design framework, the many-body-based design enables compact configuration and provides the simplest binarized energy landscape for fundamental IL gates; furthermore, we demonstrate the composability of the many-body-based IL circuit by merging modular building blocks into large-scale integer factorizers (IFs). To optimize the energy landscape of large-scale combinatorial IL circuits, we introduce degeneracy in energy levels, which enlarges the probabilities for the lowest states. Circuit simulations of our IFs reveal a significant boost in factorization accuracy. An example of a 2- ×2 -bit IF demonstrated an increment of factorization accuracy from 64.99% to 91.44% with a reduction in the number of energy levels from 32 to 9. Similarly, our 6- ×6 -bit IF increases the accuracy from 4.430% to 83.65% with the many-body design. Overall, the many-body-based design scheme provides promising results for future IL circuit designs.