'Chaogates' Hold Promise for the Semiconductor Industry

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a move that holds great significance for the semiconductor industry, a team of researchers has created an alternative to conventional logic gates, demonstrated them in silicon, and dubbed them "chaogates." The researchers present their findings in Chaos, a journal published by the American Institute of Physics.

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Simply put, they used chaotic patterns to encode and manipulate inputs to produce a desired output. They selected desired patterns from the infinite variety offered by a chaotic system. A subset of these patterns was then used to map the system inputs (initial conditions) to their desired outputs. It turns out that this process provides a method to exploit the richness inherent in nonlinear dynamics to design computing devices with the capacity to reconfigure into a range of logic gates. The resulting morphing gates are chaogates.

"Chaogates are the building block of new, chaos-based computer systems that exploit the enormous pattern formation properties of chaotic systems for computation," says William Ditto, an inventor of chaos-based computing and director of the School of Biological Health Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. "Imagine a computer that can change its own internal behavior to create a billion custom chips a second based on what the user is doing that second -- one that can reconfigure itself to be the fastest computer for that moment, for your purpose."

This program is already underway at ChaoLogix, a semiconductor company founded by Ditto and colleagues, headquartered in Gainesville, Florida, into commercial prototypes that could potentially go into every type of consumer electronic device. It has some added advantages for gaming, Ditto explains, as well as for secure computer chips (it is possibly much more immune to hacking of information at the hardware level than conventional computer chips) and custom, morphable gaming chips.

And just as important, integrated circuits using chaogates can be manufactured using the same fabrication, assembly and test facilities as those already in use today. Significantly, these integrated circuits can incorporate standard logic, memory and chaogates on the same device.

The article, "Chaogates: morphing logic gates designed to exploit dynamical patterns" by William L. Ditto, A. Miliotis, K. Murali, Sudeshna Sinha, and Mark L. Spano appears in the journal Chaos. See: http://link.aip.org/link/chaoeh/v20/i3/p037107/s1

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ABOUT Chaos

Chaos is an interdisciplinary journal of non-linear science. The journal is published quarterly by the American Institute of Physics and is devoted to increasing the understanding of nonlinear phenomena and describing the manifestations in a manner comprehensible to researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines. Special focus issues are published periodically each year and cover topics as diverse as the complex behavior of the human heart to chaotic fluid flow problems. See: http://chaos.aip.org/

ABOUT AIP

The American Institute of Physics is a federation of 10 physical science societies representing more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators and is one of the world's largest publishers of scientific information in the physical sciences. Offering partnership solutions for scientific societies and for similar organizations in science and engineering, AIP is a leader in the field of electronic publishing of scholarly journals. AIP publishes 12 journals (some of which are the most highly cited in their respective fields), two magazines, including its flagship publication Physics Today; and the AIP Conference Proceedings series. Its online publishing platform Scitation hosts nearly two million articles from more than 185 scholarly journals and other publications of 28 learned society publishers.

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SOURCE American Institute of Physics