Success for PGI: Funding for Five Projects in the DFG Priority Programme “Memristive Devices Toward Smart Technical Systems”
Five research projects involving the Peter Grünberg Institute are set to receive funding from the German research foundation Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), as part of the DFG Priority Programme SPP2262 “Memristive Devices Toward Smart Technical Systems”. “Within the framework of the projects, we will develop memristive devices for use in novel, energy-efficient computer structures and for intelligent sensor applications for the future Internet of Things in cooperation with other research institutions,” explains Dr. Stephan Menzel, a young researcher at the PGI’s “Electronic Materials” (PGI-7) division, who is involved in four of the five successful project proposals. The funding comprises approximately € 1.2 million for a period of three years. “The projects will be carried out in close cooperation with the structural development project “Neuro-inspired technologies of artificial intelligence for the electronics of the future” (NEUROTEC), which was launched in 2019. This will further increase the manpower of all the projects and strengthen networking throughout Germany,” says Rainer Waser, Director of the participating PGI Divisions PGI-7 and “Green IT” (PGI-10) as well as the Institute for Materials in Electrical Engineering II (IWE 2) at RWTH Aachen University, which is also taking part in the projects.
In the project “Memristive Time difference encoder (MemTDE)”, the partners of PGI-7 and the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center (CogniGron) are working on the development of memristor-based intelligent electronics for processing sensor signals for the Internet of Things. This is designed to process the collected information on site instead of transmitting it wirelessly, which uses a significant amount of energy.
In the “Hybrid MEMristor-CMOS Micro Electrode Array bio-sensing platform (MEMMEA)” project, the partners of PGI-7, the Helmholtz Centre Berlin, the TU Berlin and the NMI – the Natural and Medical Sciences Institute – at the University of Tübingen, are aiming to develop sensors that can directly record the activity of biological neurons. These sensors based on memristor-CMOS hybrid circuits enable direct on-chip signal processing and open up a new field of biological signal processing.
In the project “Domino Processing Unit: Towards Novel High Efficient In-Memory-Computing (MemDPU)”, the partners of PGI-7 and the Chemnitz University of Technology are working on a new type of computer, the Domino Processing Unit (DPU). In contrast to conventional von Neumann architecture computers, the DPU enables computing to be carried out directly in memory. With the DPU, high energy consumption is avoided due to the communication taking place between the memory and the processing unit.
In the project “Universal Memcomputing in Hardware Realizations of Memristor Cellular Nonlinear Networks (Mem2CNN)”, the partners of PGI-10, PGI-7 and the TU Dresden are pursuing the development of memristive cellular neural networks. These networks enable the direct processing of video signals, for example in the form of edge detection for pattern recognition. In this way, visual data could be processed in real-time.
In the project “Robust Compute-in Memory using Memristors ROBCOMM”, the partners of IWE 2, PGI-7 and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are working on the development of reliable, efficient circuits based on memristive components that enable a Computation-in-Memory (CIM) architecture. The CIM architecture enables complex computational operations such as vector-matrix operations to be performed efficiently, or large systems of equations to be solved directly.
Further information:
Information from the DFG on the programme “Memristive Devices Toward Smart Technical Systems” (SPP 2262)