A Probabilistic Self-Annealing Compute Fabric Based on 560 Hexagonally Coupled Ring Oscillators for Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems

Abstract

NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) are very expensive to solve with traditional computers. COPs can be mapped to a coupled spin network where the ground state of the system is the solution. We propose a scalable truly coupled CMOS oscillator-based integrated system mimicking a spin network to solve COPs in hardware. Our simple latch-based coupling design finds solutions of max-cut problems with 85%–100% accuracy 104-106 times faster than commercial software running on a CPU.