CogniGron Seminar by Erika Covi (University of Groningen): "Memristive neuromorphic computing"

Abstract

In the past two decades, the shift towards a distributed computing paradigm led our smart systems to become more and more interconnected. These systems need to elaborate increasing amount of data while featuring low-power operation, area efficiency, and ability to interact with the external world in real time. Memristive technology, with its unique characteristics and capabilities, holds great promise for the design of such cognitive systems. The potential for energy-efficient and parallel computing, combined with the ability to integrate complex neural and synaptic dynamics within a single device, provides avenues for high-performance hardware implementations. Moreover, by offering volatile and non-volatile memory in a small footprint, enabling dense integration, and facilitating in-memory computing, memristive technology presents advantages that, if correctly combined with CMOS technology, can extend the functionality of current artificial intelligent systems.

In this talk, we discuss the challenges and the opportunities to realise memristive neuromorphic computing by developing novel hardware architectures and learning algorithms specifically tailored to best exploit the intrinsic properties of memristive technology. Indeed, we show that memristive technology offers vast potential, but its effective utilization relies on the synergetic development of memristive devices, circuits, and algorithms to create performing hardware cognitive systems.

About Erika Covi

Dr. Erika Covi is Assistant Professor at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials and the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Center, University of Groningen (the Netherlands).

She received her PhD in Microelectronics in 2014 from the University of Pavia (Italy), where she worked on designing integrated systems for the characterisation of memristive devices. She worked at the National Research Council (CNR) of Italy, at Politecnico di Milano (Italy), and as Senior Scientist at NaMLab gGmbH, Dresden (Germany), where she was the leader of the Cognitive Systems group. She was awarded with an ERC Starting Grant for the project MEMRINESS on the development of memristive neurons and synapses for neuromorphic edge computing in 2021.

Her research interests lie at the intersection of emerging devices, circuit design, and brain-inspired computing. More specifically, they focus on exploiting the intrinsic physical characteristics of memristive devices to reproduce computational primitives of the brain in mixed neuromorphic-memristive systems.