Hardware for Modern Day Computing

1. Hardware and Computation Today

- Basics of diodes, transistors, and CMOS as digital switches and memory

-The elegant mapping between CMOS and Boolean logic

-Energy and performance (including constraints) of present-day hardware and computation.

2. Limitations of Present Hardware and Computing Technology

- All computing problems are not created equal- Computational complexity, examples of problems (e.g. TSP, graph coloring) where present-day computing still struggles

- Limits of current hardware technologies for such problems

3. Emerging Computational and Hardware Approaches

-Examples in Neuromorphic Computation and supporting hardware: Spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) learning along with new hardware technologies (e. g. RRAM) aligned to such computation

- Analog Computing Approaches: Computing with phase and frequency of oscillators, associative memory

-New computing models: e.g. Ising model

Pre-requisites

ECE Fundamentals II