An efficient synchronous updating memristor-based Ising solver for combinatorial optimization

Abstract

Despite showing significant potential in solving combinatorial optimization problems, existing memristor-based solvers update node states asynchronously by performing matrix multiplication column-by-column, leaving the massive parallelism of the crossbar not fully exploited. In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate solving the optimization problems with a synchronous-updating memristor-based Ising solver, which is realized by a binary neural network-inspired updating algorithm and a physics-inspired annealing method. The newly proposed method saves more than 5x time and 35x energy consumption compared to the state-of-the-art mem-HNN for finding the optimal solution to a 60-node Max-cut problem.