The development of a new method to make non-volatile computer memory may have unlocked a problem that has been holding back machine learning and has the potential to revolutionize technologies like voice recognition, image processing and autonomous driving.
A team from Sandia National Laboratories, working with collaborators from the University of Michigan, published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Materials that details a new method that will imbue computer chips that power machine-learning applications with more processing power by using a common material found in house paint in an analog memory device that enables highly energy-efficient machine inference operations.
Titanium oxide is one of the most commonly made materials. Every paint we buy has titanium oxide in it. It’s cheap and nontoxic.
It’s an oxide, there’s already oxygen there. But if we take a few out, we create what are called oxygen vacancies. It turns out that when we create oxygen vacancies, we make this material electrically conductive.
Those oxygen vacancies can now store electrical data, giving almost any device more computing power. The researchers create the oxygen vacancies by heating a computer chip with a titanium oxide coating above 302 degrees Fahrenheit (150 degree Celsius), separate some of the oxygen molecules from the material using electrochemistry and create vacancies.
Right now, computers generally work by storing data in one place and processing that data in another place. That means computers have to constantly transfer data from one place to the next, wasting energy and computing power. This new process has the potential to completely change how computers work.
What the researchers have done is make the processing and the storage at the same place. They have been able to do it in a predictable and repeatable manner.
The researchers see the use of oxygen vacancies as a way to help machine learning overcome a big obstacle holding it back right now — power consumption.
In case of autonomous vehicles, making decisions about driving consumes a large amount of energy to process all the inputs. The researchers say that if we can create an alternative material for computer chips, they will be able to process information more efficiently, saving energy and processing a lot more data.
Currently, if we want to give our cell phone a voice command, we need to be connected to a network that transfers the command to a central hub of computers that listen to our voice and then send a signal back telling our phone what to do. Through this new process, voice recognition and other functions happen right in our phone.
News Source: Sandia National Laboratories
