Phys.org August 3, 2022
An international team of researchers (USA – Purdue University, New York University, UC San Diego, University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern, UC Santa Barbara, NIST, UC Davis, Brookhaven National Laboratory, France) summarizes and reflects on efforts to find “quantum materials” that can mimic brain function. CMOS has been engineered to keep different information states well-separated. It is not very well-designed for doing things where there is a lot of randomness and fluctuations. The human brain, on the other hand, can easily handle such tricky tasks while consuming dramatically less energy than modern computers. According to the researchers the solution will be materials that possess some of the same traits that is found in the natural brain. We want to look at materials that are inherently unstable and fluctuating. A traditional computer is energy-intensive because the memory and the calculation unit are separate, and data are continually shuffled back and forth between them. In the natural brain the computation and the memory are much more collocated, information is much more distributed over the whole network, so there is no need to move it around…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
A scanning transmission electron microscopy image showing the cross section of a thin VO2 device… Credit: APL Materials 10, 070904 (2022)Â