Nanoscale Architectures

Professor Kang Wang

Electrical Engineering's Professor Kang Wang, Adjunct Professor Mary Eshaghian-Wilner, and researcher Alexander Khitun announced a critical new breakthrough in semiconductor spin-wave research: three novel nanoscale computational architectures using a technology they pioneered called "spin-wave buses" as the mechanism for interconnection. The architectures are power efficient and possess a high degree of interconnectivity. The first device is a reconfi gurable mesh interconnected with spin-wave buses. The architecture of the device requires the same number of switches and buses as standard reconfi gurable meshes, but is capable of simultaneously transmitting multiple waves using different frequencies on each of the spin-wave buses. This makes the parallel architecture capable of very fast and fault-tolerant algorithms.

The second device is a fully connected cluster of functional units with spin-wave buses. Each node simultaneously broadcasts to all other nodes, and can receive and process multiple data concurrently. The novel design allows all nodes to intercommunicate in constant time. This invention overcomes traditional area restrictions found in current networks. Third is a spin-wave-based crossbar for fully interconnecting multiple inputs to multiple outputs.

As compared to standard molecular crossbar designs, UCLA's is much more fault-tolerant, allowing the reconfiguration of alternate paths in case of switch failure. By transmitting waves instead of traditional current charge transmission, the design architecture allows a large reduction in power consumption and provides a high level of interconnectivity between many more paths than currently possible.