A Probabilistic Compute Fabric Based on Coupled Ring Oscillators for Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems

• Published in: IEEE journal of solid-state circuits Vol. 56; no. 9; pp. 2870 - 2880
• Main Authors: Ahmed, Ibrahim, Chiu, Po-Wei, Moy, William, Kim, Chris H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.09.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Annealing processor; CMOS; Combinatorial analysis; combinatorial optimization problem (COP); Computational modeling; Coupling; Couplings; Electric potential; Hardware; Integrated circuit modeling; Inverters; Ising computer; Ising model; Optimization; oscillator-based computation; Oscillators; Polynomials; Probabilistic logic; Ring oscillators; Voltage
• ISSN: 0018-9200; 1558-173X
• DOI: 10.1109/JSSC.2021.3062821

Nondeterministic polynomial time hard (NP-hard) combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) are intractable to solve using a traditional computer as the time to find a solution increases very rapidly with the number of variables. An efficient alternative computing method uses coupled spin networks to solve COP. This work presents a first-of-its-kind coupled ring oscillator (ROSC)-based scalable probabilistic Ising computer to solve NP-hard COPs. An integrated coupled oscillator network was designed with 560 ROSCs that mimic a coupled spin network. Each ROSC can be coupled to any of its neighbors using programmable back-to-back (B2B) inverter-based coupling mechanism. The ROSC-based spins and B2B inverter-based coupling were optimized to work under a wide range of system noise as well as voltage and temperature variations. Randomly generated 1000 max-cut problems were mapped and solved in the hardware. The integrated Ising computer produced satisfactory solutions of max-cut problems when compared with commercial software running on a CPU. Experiments show that the integrated CMOS-based Ising computer can find the solution to NP-hard problems with an accuracy of 82%-100%. In addition, the repeated measurements of the same problem showed that the Ising computer can traverse through several local minima to find high-quality solutions under various voltage and temperature variation conditions. The experimental results show that ROSCs are a potential candidate for a dedicated hardware accelerator aiming to solve a wide range of COPs.