Switching to analogue probability processing could drastically cut the size and power consumption of flash memory error correction, claims MIT spin-out Lyric Semiconductor.
"At 30nm, the raw error rate of flash memory is 1:1000. At 20nm, the error rate is 1:100. What you want is 1:10[15]," Lyric business development manager Mira Wilczek told EW.
Introducing and decoding low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes can make the final bit error rate almost arbitrarily low.
But it requires considerable processing power.
"The first commercial application of our probability processing is flash error correction," said Lyric. It offers a 30x reduction in die size at 1Gbit/s, and a 12x improvement in power consumption, all at higher throughput compared to today's digital solutions."
What is inside?
According to Wilczek, Lyric has developed analogue versions of Boolean building blocks, which it is calling probability or Bayesian logic.
"The circuit technology is not digital, it is really efficient at computing with probabilities, and it does with just a few transistors what typically takes hundreds," claimed the firm.
Bayesian logic, said Lyric, is inherently good at solving questions like: if the probability of event A happening is 40%, and the probability of B happening is 50%, what is the probability of both A and B happening?
The firm is partly funded by the US military funding agency DARPA, for which it has been doing undisclosed work.
It is offering two technologies for commercial licensing:
Lyric Error Correction (LEC) for flash memory
And a more general purpose probability processor dubbed GP5.
"The GP5 will be ideally suited to calculate probabilities for all types of applications, from web searches to genome sequencing, and could enable performance gains of 1,000x over today's digital x86-based systems," said Lyric.
GP5 has its own processing language called PSBL (probability synthesis to Bayesian logic) for working with probability based computations, which is demonstrated solving Sudoku puzzles in the company web site.