Date and Time:
Location: Seminar room OMZ (U013, INF 350, floor -1)
Title: Advancing Cognitive Systems Leveraging Emerging Memory Technologies
Abstract: In the past two decades, the shift towards a distributed computing paradigm led our smart systems to become more and more interconnected. These systems need to elaborate increasingly amount of data while featuring low-power operation, area efficiency, and ability to interact with the external world in real time. Emerging memory technology, with its unique characteristics and capabilities, holds great promise for the design of such cognitive systems. The potential for energy-efficient and parallel computing, combined with the ability to integrate complex neural and synaptic dynamics within a single device, provides avenues for high-performance hardware implementations. Moreover, by offering volatile and non-volatile memory in a small footprint, enabling dense integration, and facilitating in-memory computing, emerging memory technology presents advantages that, if correctly combined with CMOS technology, can extend the functionality of current artificial intelligent systems.
In this talk, we emphasize the need for system-technology co-optimisation (STCO) of emerging memory devices and CMOS circuits to enable seamless integration and to exploit the strengths of both technologies. Furthermore, we discuss how the co-design of devices, circuits, and algorithms indeed requires identifying and addressing issues related to device variability, scalability, and system integration. Finally, we show that the design of performing hardware cognitive systems relies on the synergetic development of memristive devices, circuits, and algorithms.
CV: Dr. Erika Covi is Assistant Professor at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials and the Groningen Cognitive Systems and Materials Centre, University of Groningen (the Netherlands), where she leads the Cognitive Systems (CoSy) Group. She received her PhD in Microelectronics in 2014 from the University of Pavia (Italy), where she worked on designing integrated systems for the characterisation of emerging memory devices. She worked at the National Research Council (CNR) of Italy, at Politecnico di Milano (Italy), and as Senior Scientist at NaMLab gGmbH, Dresden (Germany), where she was the leader of the Cognitive Systems group. She was awarded with an ERC Starting Grant for the project MEMRINESS on the development of memristive neurons and synapses for neuromorphic edge computing in 2021. Her research interests lie at the intersection of emerging devices, circuit design, and brain-inspired computing. More specifically, they focus on extending the functionality of CMOS circuits by leveraging the intrinsic physical characteristics of emerging memory devices to design advanced cognitive systems.