Non-Boolean computing with nanomagnets for computer vision applications.
The field of nanomagnetism has recently attracted tremendous attention as it can potentially deliver low-power, high-speed and dense non-volatile memories. It is now possible to engineer the size, shape, spacing, orientation and composition of sub-100 nm magnetic structures. This has spurred the exploration of nanomagnets for unconventional computing paradigms. Here, we harness the energy-minimization nature of nanomagnetic systems to solve the quadratic optimization problems that arise in computer vision applications, which are computationally expensive. By exploiting the magnetization states of nanomagnetic disks as state representations of a vortex and single domain, we develop a magnetic Hamiltonian and implement it in a magnetic system that can identify the salient features of a given image with more than 85% true positive rate. These results show the potential of this alternative computing method to develop a magnetic coprocessor that might solve complex problems in fewer clock cycles than traditional processors.
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620, USA.
Sanjukta
S
Bhanja
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620, USA.
D K
DK
Karunaratne
Department of Computer Science &Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620, USA.
Ravi
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5417-6605
R
Panchumarthy
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620, USA.
Srinath
S
Rajaram
Department of Computer Science &Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida 33620, USA.
Sudeep
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7332-4207
S
Sarkar