The transistor celebrated its 75 th birthday in 2022. The continued scaling of the transistor defined by Moore's Law continues, albeit at a slower pace. Meanwhile, computing demands and energy consumption required by modern artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have skyrocketed. As an alternative to scaling transistors for general-purpose computing, the integration of transistors with unconventional technologies has emerged as a promising path for domain-specific computing. In this article, we provide a full-stack review of probabilistic computing with p-bits as a representative example of the energy-efficient and domain-specific computing movement. We argue that p-bits could be used to build energy-efficient probabilistic systems, tailored for probabilistic algorithms and applications. From hardware, architecture, and algorithmic perspectives, we outline the main applications of probabilistic computers ranging from probabilistic machine learning and AI to combinatorial optimization and quantum simulation. Combining emerging nanodevices with the existing CMOS ecosystem will lead to probabilistic computers with orders of magnitude improvements in energy efficiency and probabilistic sampling, potentially unlocking previously unexplored regimes for powerful probabilistic algorithms.
Probabilistic computing has emerged as a viable approach
to solve
hard optimization problems. Devices with inherent stochasticity can
greatly simplify their implementation in electronic hardware. Here,
we demonstrate intrinsic stochastic resistance switching controlled
via electric fields in perovskite nickelates doped with hydrogen.
The ability of hydrogen ions to reside in various metastable configurations
in the lattice leads to a distribution of transport gaps. With experimentally
characterized p-bits, a shared-synapse p-bit architecture demonstrates
highly parallelized and energy-efficient solutions to optimization
problems such as integer factorization and Boolean satisfiability.
The results introduce perovskite nickelates as scalable potential
candidates for probabilistic computing and showcase the potential
of light-element dopants in next-generation correlated semiconductors.
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