Collaborative Research: SHF: Small: RUI: CMOS+X: Honey-ReRAM Enabled 3D Neuromorphic Accelerator

Current computing systems are facing significant challenges including extremely high energy demand, tremendous consumption of nonrenewable materials, environmental and health issues by electronic waste, and lack of technologies to improve system performance by integration of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) microchips with emerging device technologies (denoted X) – “CMOS+X”. This project will address these challenges by exploring an innovative technology to integrate CMOS periphery circuits with a novel memory technology - natural organic honey based resistive switching random access memory (honey-ReRAM) for a new brain-inspired neuromorphic computing system. The prototyped “CMOS + honey-ReRAM” computing system is promising to promote high performance, energy efficient, and sustainable in-memory computing capability for many high impact domains such as engineering, social science, national health, and defense. In addition, the proposed education activities offer unique training opportunities for underrepresented researchers including female, African American, and Native American students. This project targets to explore innovations in device fabrication and system integration technologies to optimize honey-ReRAM devices, establish the feasibility of 3D integration of CMOS circuits with honey-ReRAM arrays, and prototype a CMOS + honey-ReRAM enabled neuromorphic accelerator, an essential neural network hardware component for data processing in a vast range of devices in computing and artificial intelligence. The honey-ReRAM will have highly reproducible memory characteristics, thermal stability, long-term reliability, low-cost, as well as being sustainable. The honey ReRAM will also utilize an eco-friendly synthesis process and device manufacture. A novel three-dimensional (3D) architecture and fabrication technology with a formal design flow will be developed to ensure the compatibility of combining CMOS circuitry with honey-ReRAM arrays by a heterogeneous integration on the microchip. Furthermore, this research will provide a solution to the incompatibility problem in the integration between CMOS and X and effectively accelerate the development and application of CMOS+X technologies for system-level improvements in computing. This project is jointly funded by the Software and Hardware Foundations (SHF) program in the Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF) division, and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.