Ultra low power coupled oscillator arrays for computer vision applications

Abstract

Coupled oscillators provide an efficient non-Boolean paradigm for solving a variety of computationally intensive problems in computer vision. This motivates the realization of large networks of low-power coupled oscillators. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate: (i) a relaxation oscillator based on the insulator-metal transition (IMT) in vanadium dioxide (VO2) with record low DC input (peak) power of ~23 μW; (ii) a network of coupled VO2 oscillators with record number of elements (6 oscillators) which perform image processing functionalities in high dimensional space like color detection and morphological operations such as dilation and erosion). Calibrated simulations show that 10× reduction in power compared to a 32 nm CMOS accelerator at iso-throughput.