My vision of Bio-inspired Electronic Design

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I took part in a Panel on Bio-inspired Electronic Design Principles at the

SRC Workshop on EDA/BDA Interaction Roadmap

Here are my slides

The quick summary of these ideas is here:

 

Summary of ideas for discussion from Alex Yakovlev, Newcastle University

 

With my 30 years of experience in designing and automating the design of self-timed (aka asynchronous) systems, I have been involved in studying and exploiting in practice the following characteristics of electronic systems:  inherent concurrency, event-driven and causality-based processing, parametric variation resilience, close-loop timing error avoidance and correction, energy-proportionality, digital and mixed-signal interfaces. More recently, I have been looking at new bio-inspired paradigms such as energy-modulated and power-adaptive computing, significance-driven approximate computing, real-power (to match real-time!) computing, computing with survival instincts, computing with central and peripheral powering and timing, power layering in systems architecting, exploiting burstiness and regularity of processing etc.

In most of these the central role belongs to the notion of energy flow as a key driving force in the new generation of microelectronics. I will therefore be approaching most of the Questions raised for the Panel from the energy flow perspective. The other strong aspect I want to address that acts as a drive for innovation in electronics is a combination of technological and economic factors, which is closely related to survival, both in the sense of longevity of a particular system as well as survival of design patterns and IPs as a longevity of the system as a kind or as a system design process.

My main tenets in this discussion are:

  • Compute where energy naturally flows.
  • Evolve (IPs, Designs) where biology (or nature as a whole) would evolve its parts (DNA, cells, cellular networks, organs).

I will also pose as one of the biggest challenges for semiconductor system the challenge of massive informational connectivity of parts at all levels of hierarchy, this is something that I hypothesize can only be addressed in hybrid cell-microelectronic systems. Information (and hence, data processing) flows should be commensurate to energy flows, only then we will be close to thermodynamic limits.

Alex Yakovlev

11.08.2016

 

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