€3mn grant to develop insect inspired memory devices

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CEA-Leti has announced that Elisa Vianello, a scientist and Edge AI program coordinator, has received a grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to build nanoscale memory devices inspired by insect nervous systems.

www.newelectronics.co.uk, Mar. 23, 2022 – 

The grant, worth €3mn, will be used to apply the technology to applications such as consumer robotics, implantable medical diagnostic microchips and wearable electronics.

While powerful algorithms will enable machines to learn from experience and interact autonomously with the environment this will require nanosystems with breakthrough architectures enabled by novel nanotechnologies, because current architectures are inefficient in handling AI tasks.

Moving data between processors and memories, for example, uses up to 90 percent of the devices' total energy consumption and research groups have tried to overcome this limitation by developing in-memory computing architectures that use nanoscale memory devices for both processing and data storage. This ambitious approach, however, requires very high-density, high-resolution, non-volatile memory with unlimited endurance. This capability does not currently exist despite a decade of focused efforts to create these memories.

"My project is to take inspiration from insects' nervous systems to relax hardware requirements in terms of memory density and reliability, and to build the new nanosystems we need to enable learning from a very limited volume of noisy data," explained Vianello.

"Crickets make accurate decisions based on sluggish, imprecise, and unreliable neurons and synapses in order to escape their predators. Looking closely at their biology, we identified a diversity of memory-like functions at play in their sensory and nervous systems," said Vianello. "By combining these different functions, the cricket's internal computing system achieves amazing performance and energy efficiency.

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