'Chaogates' hold promise for the semiconductor industry

November 16, 2010

In a move that holds great significance for the semiconductor industry, a team of researchers has created an alternative to conventional logic gates, demonstrated them in silicon, and dubbed them "chaogates." The researchers present their findings in Chaos.

Simply put, they used chaotic patterns to encode and manipulate inputs to produce a desired output. They selected desired patterns from the infinite variety offered by a chaotic system. A subset of these patterns was then used to map the system inputs (initial conditions) to their desired outputs. It turns out that this process provides a method to exploit the richness inherent in nonlinear dynamics to design computing devices with the capacity to reconfigure into a range of . The resulting morphing gates are chaogates.

"Chaogates are the building block of new, chaos-based computer systems that exploit the enormous pattern formation properties of chaotic systems for computation," says William Ditto, an inventor of chaos-based computing and director of the School of Biological Health Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. "Imagine a computer that can change its own internal behavior to create a billion custom chips a second based on what the user is doing that second -- one that can reconfigure itself to be the fastest computer for that moment, for your purpose."

This program is already underway at ChaoLogix, a semiconductor company founded by Ditto and colleagues, headquartered in Gainsville, Florida, into commercial prototypes that could potentially go into every type of consumer electronic device. It has some added advantages for gaming, Ditto explains, as well as for secure computer chips (it is possibly much more immune to hacking of information at the hardware level than conventional ) and custom, morphable gaming chips.

And just as important, integrated circuits using chaogates can be manufactured using the same fabrication, assembly and test facilities as those already in use today. Significantly, these can incorporate standard logic, memory and chaogates on the same device.

More information: The article, "Chaogates: morphing logic gates designed to exploit dynamical patterns" by William L. Ditto, A. Miliotis, K. Murali, Sudeshna Sinha, and Mark L. Spano appears in the journal Chaos. See: http://link.aip.or … 3/p037107/s1

Provided by American Institute of Physics

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Mike_Bailey
Nov 16, 2010

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
It sounds like they are reproducing the brains most important quality, either that or the Infinite Improbability Drive. ;)
gmurphy
Nov 16, 2010

Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
Very interesting, very sparse on actual information, how stable are these patterns once they have been identified?, what techniques were used to map the space of chaotic patterns?
ShadowRam
Nov 16, 2010

Rank: not rated yet
Sounds a lot like 'neural networks', but still has the problem that the 'system' still doesn't have a way of knowing if its output is the 'desired' one or not.
gtwilliams
Nov 16, 2010

Rank: 3 / 5 (2)
Like 'gmurphy' said, there is not a lot of information provided. On the surface I am reminded of reconfigurable logic FPGAs.
stealthc
Nov 16, 2010

Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
was gunna say sounds like fpga's. There were drawbacks to those, this sounds a little nicer but still, what on earth are the drawbacks versus conventional technology? Not a very informative article, blatantly so with no mention of fpga.
Zed123
Nov 17, 2010

Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
ITs a news article. This is why they have a link to the paper at the bottom of it. If your interested to learn more, try looking under the "More Information" section.

Seems to be almost every article posted on Physorg, someone pipes up complaining that it doesn;t contain enough info. Its a news site people. Not an online science journal. If you aren;t happy with the conmtent don't read it but stop the complaining.
saintneko
Nov 17, 2010

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
The paper is actually free to read, so I'd have to concur with Zed123, if you don't like the content provided here, you're free to go read the actual scientific paper you wont understand to glean more meaning, where they cover the reprogrammable FPGA angle among others. In the first page, even.
Ravenrant
Nov 17, 2010

Rank: not rated yet
. "Imagine a computer that can change its own internal behavior to create a billion custom chips a second based on what the user is doing that second -- one that can reconfigure itself to be the fastest computer for that moment, for your purpose."

Or the slowest if it gets an MSOS.
Rank 4.8 /5 (8 votes)
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