MemrisTec
Many members of the priority program MemrisTec attended the 7th International Conference on Memristive Materials, Devices & Systems (MEMRISYS 2024) that took place at in Seoul (Korea) from 10 to 13 November 2024.
A special success was the given Best Poster Award for Richard Schroedter presenting the poster “An ErMnO3 memristive spiking neuristor” for his team with the contributors Ahmet Şamil Demirkol, Rong Wu, Catherine Dubourdieu, and Ronald Tetzlaff.
The MemrisTec members Ilia Valov and John Paul Strachan (both from FZ Jülich) were choosen by the Nature editors to speak at the 2nd Nature Conference on Neuromorphic Computing in Shangri-La Beijing, China, from October 13, 2024 – October 16, 2024.
5 years after the 1st conference they will discuss in an interdisciplinary audience how to create more efficient and intelligent computing systems. Among the further speakers is also one member of the MemrisTec International Advisory Committee, Wei Lu from the University of Michigan, USA.
Numerous MemrisTec scientists followed the invitation of the colleagues in Aachen and Jülich to the ICNCE2024, the International Conference on Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering in Aachen. From 3.-6. June participants from the disciplines Neuroscience & Brain Research, Electrical Engineering & Material Physics, and Computer Science & AI Research, exchanged their understanding of the brain and brain-inspired technologies like artificial synapses with memristive devices.
The priority program MemrisTec was presented with a poster giving an overview on the 16 projects and the coordination measures.
We would like to thank everyone who took part in our Girls’Day 2024! Dr. Carsten Knoll led an engaging hands-on session exploring artificial intelligence through object recognition using mini computers. The enthusiasm and curiosity of the young girls was truly inspiring. We hope the participants enjoyed the experience and learned some valuable insights which they can implement in their scientific journey.
Moreover, we look forward to more successful Girl’s Day events in the future.
The awards for the best presentation at the MemrisTec2024 workshop went to the young scientists from the project MemTDE (Memristive Time Difference Encoder):
Johannes Hellwig and Dimitris Spithouris from the Peter Grünberg Institute 7 at Forschungszentrum Jülich as well as Hugh Greatorex from CogniGron at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands were rated best in terms of their presentation skills by the jury from the MemrisTec Board.
The annual workshop of the MemrisTec priority program took place this year in Nuremberg at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. The host was Prof. Dr. Dietmar Fey. The location and time of the workshop were specifically chosen so that demonstrators created during the first funding phase could also be presented at the embedded world trade fair.
We wish the MemTDE project team all the best for the future!
The embedded world fair, the leading international trade fair for embedded systems, concluded last week. Among the standout exhibitors was also MemrisTec, the research program dedicated to bring memristive devices toward smart technical systems. Our booth 5-140 at the fair proved to be a captivating destination for industry professionals and technology enthusiasts alike.
At the end of the 1960s, Leon Chua created the term memristor, an artificial word made up of the words “memory” and “resistor”. According to Chua’s circuit theory, memristor includes all devices whose current/voltage curve runs through the point of origin of the coordinate system and thus, in contrast to other non-volatile memory elements such as ferrite core memories, have a squeezed hysteresis curve. As with all non-volatile memory elements, the state stored in the memristor is not lost even after the operating voltage is switched off.
In addition to the more familiar elements such as resistive ReRAMs (ReRAMs), phase change memories (PCMs) and spin-torque transfer magnetic resistive RAMs (STT-MRAM), this class of memristive components also includes so-called ferroelectric tunnel junction (FTJ) devices. Compared to the other variants mentioned, the latter have the great advantage of generating extremely low readout currents.
It is possible to use this advantage to build embedded AI architectures based on so-called hyperdimensional computing (HDC), which is a kind of alternative to deep neural networks.
In HDC systems, information, e.g. given in the form of individual vectors, is stored distributed in the entries of a very large vector, called a hypervector. Such HDC systems can be used, for example, to analyze EMG signals in order to recognize hand gestures. A large number of e.g. binary entries in the vectors is important.
E.g., such hypervectors can be stored in matrix-shaped crossbar structures. When recognizing a gesture, a large number of elements in a column may have to be read out in parallel and added up. To prevent the currents from becoming too large, it is advisable for the read-out elements to produce only small currents, and this is precisely the case with FTJs.
In order to build crossbar structures in highly integrated mixed-signal chips that can be realized with FTJs in the future, computer architecture studies must be carried out in advance. This allows the crossbar structures to be better evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. One means of doing this is simulation.
For this reason, the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has been working on the project “ReLoFemRis – Reconfigurable Logic and Multi-bit in-memory processing with ferroelectric memristors” as part of the priority program funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG SPP 2262).
In ReLoFemRis, the adaptation of FTJs for computer architectures has generally been researched in recent years and a device and architecture simulator has been developed for that in SystemC.
This simulator was presented at the booth. It has shown how a corresponding architecture can be used for hand gesture recognition.
Artificial Intelligence Memristive Logic (AiML) Technology is a pioneering memristor-based Computing-in-Memory (CIM) startup tailored for Edge AI applications. Through memristive arrays, it not only stores AI model weights directly on-chip but also conducts the matrix-matrix multiplications. In the embedded world landscape of 2024, the AiML demonstrator will showcase image classification capabilities with remarkable efficiency, boasting ultra-low power consumption tailored specifically for Edge AI deployments.
The presented emulator opens the possibilities to characterize electrical properties of the proposed integrated chip and to measure biological samples with a robust system which is easy to modify. These measurements allows us to test different parameter settings and to determine the interaction between neural tissue and the used signal processing.
The emulator consists of certain PCBs with discrete electronic devices as well as a commercially available passive „Multi-Electrode-Array“ (MEA) and a simple passive „Memrisive-Array“ (MEMA) processed on a blank standard waver (with SiO2 coating).
The 2024 episode of the MemrisTec Summer Schools will bring interested students and researchers together at CogniGron in the university of Groningen, Netherlands.
The host of the 2024 exchange workshop of the MemrisTec priority program is the Friedrich-Alexander-University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg with the Chair of Computer Architecture under the direction of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dietmar Fey.
The final workshop of funding phase I will simultaneously initiate funding phase II with the presentation of the results of the ongoing projects and provide an outlook on the projects of the coming years.
MemrisTec2024 will take place from April 9 to 12, 2024 and will enable participants to experience the embedded world trade fair, where MemrisTec will also be represented with a stand (Hall 5, Stand 5.140) and several demonstrators.
Prof. Dr. Anjana Devi, a distinguished expert on chemistry of functional nanoscale and 2D materials, has been appointed as the Director of the Institute for Materials Chemistry (IMC) at Leibniz Institute of Solid State and Materials Research Dresden (IFW). Concurrently, she is anticipated to be appointed with the prestigious role of Chair of Materials Chemistry at the Faculty of Chemistry and Food Chemistry at the Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden).
Professor Dr. Anjana Devi, an esteemed scientist of Indian origin, earned Doctorate from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India. Since 1998, she has been working with the Ruhr-University, Bochum, where she held the position of Professor of Inorganic Materials Chemistry since 2011. Her exceptional contributions to the field have been recognized internationally, for which she received an Honorary Doctorate from Aalto University, Finland.
During the conference MEMRISYS in Turin, from 5th to 9th of November 2023, Johannes Hellwig received the “Best oral Award” for his talk „ Resolving the Physical Origin of LRS Relaxation in Valence Change Memory”. Johannes Hellwig is a researcher of Forschungszentrum Jülich (PGI-7) active in the MemrisTec project MemTDE as well as in the project NEUROTEC.
