Stochastic Electronics: A Neuro-Inspired Design Paradigm for Integrated Circuits

As advances in integrated circuit (IC) fabrication technology reduce feature sizes to dimensions on the order of nanometers, IC designers are facing many of the problems that evolution has had to overcome in order to perform meaningful and accurate computations in biological neural circuits. In this paper, we explore the current state of IC technology including the many new and exciting opportunities “beyond CMOS.” We review the role of noise in both biological and engineered systems and discuss how “stochastic facilitation” can be used to perform useful and precise computation. We explore nondeterministic methodologies for computation in hardware and introduce the concept of stochastic electronics (SE); a new way to design circuits and increase performance in highly noisy and mismatched fabrication environments. This approach is illustrated with several circuit examples whose results demonstrate its exciting potential.