SWIM · A SpinWave Ising Machine

A SpinWave Ising Machine

Rapid and energy-efficient solvers of combinatorial optimization problems are necessary in numerous applications molecular assembly and protein folding in medicine, high frequency trading in finance and circuit design optimization in electronics. Ising machines (IMs) are physics-inspired combinatorial optimization solvers which can accelerate solving a wide class of problems - nondeterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard and NP-complete problems with a time-to-solution parameter. Ising machines improve time-to-solution scaling for combinatorial problems from exponential to sub-exponential or even polynomial scaling for certain subclass of problems. The SWIM project tackles a critical challenge for the emerging field of Ising Machines: the development of miniaturized, low-power, and low-cost IMs with high computational power, commercial feasibility, and speed beyond classical Von-Neuman and CMOS-based solutions. The SWIM project is built upon the achievements of Coherent Ising machines which use optical pulses as equivalent Ising spins. CIMs offer thousands of computational spins for large combinatorial problems but are bulky, highly consuming and temperature unstable. The SWIM project solves these disadvantages through the use of exceptionally slow and low-power propagating spinwaves in an novel architecture of time-multiplexed spinwave Ising Machines. Because spin-waves propagate more than five orders of magnitude slower than light, an entire time-multiplexed Ising network fits on a compact mm-size yttrium-iron-garnet (YIG) chip and is driven with standard ready-from-the-shelf microwave electronics. This solutions reduces hardware volume, slashes power consumption from kilowatts to milliwatts, and paves the way for chip integration.

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