Charge-based computing with analogue reconfigurable gates

Abstract: As the world enters the age of ubiquitous computing, the need for reconfigurable hardware operating close to the fundamental limits of energy consumption becomes increasingly pressing. Simultaneously, scaling-driven performance improvements within the framework of traditional analogue and digital design become progressively more restricted by fundamental physical constraints. Thus, a true paradigm shift in electronics design is required for fuelling the next big burst in technology. Here we lay the foundations of a new design paradigm that fuses analogue and digital thinking by combining digital electronics with memristive devices for achieving charge-based computation; information processing where every dissipated charge counts. This is realised by introducing memristive devices into standard logic gates, thus rendering them reconfigurable and able to perform analogue computation at a power cost close to digital. The power of this concept is then showcased by experimentally demonstrating a hardware data clusterer and a fuzzy NAND gate using this principle.