Experimental Demonstration of a Reconfigurable Coupled Oscillator Platform to Solve the Max-Cut Problem

In this work, we experimentally demonstrate an integrated circuit (IC) of 30 relaxation oscillators with reconfigurable capacitive coupling to solve the NP-Hard maximum cut (Max-Cut) problem. We show that under the influence of an external second-harmonic injection signal, the oscillator phases exhi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mohammad Khairul Bashar, Antik Mallick, Daniel S. Truesdell, Benton H. Calhoun, Siddharth Joshi, Nikhil Shukla
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2020-01-01
Series:IEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9204635/
Description
Summary:In this work, we experimentally demonstrate an integrated circuit (IC) of 30 relaxation oscillators with reconfigurable capacitive coupling to solve the NP-Hard maximum cut (Max-Cut) problem. We show that under the influence of an external second-harmonic injection signal, the oscillator phases exhibit a bipartition that can be used to calculate a high-quality approximate Max-Cut solution. Leveraging the all-to-all reconfigurable coupling architecture, we experimentally evaluate the computational properties of the oscillators using randomly generated graph instances of varying size and edge density (η). Furthermore, comparing the Max-Cut solutions with the optimal values, we show that the oscillators (after simple postprocessing) produce a Max-Cut that is within 99% of the optimal value in 28 of the 36 measured graphs; importantly, the oscillators are particularly effective in dense graphs with the Max-Cut being optimal in seven out of nine measured graphs with η = 0.8. Our work marks a step toward creating an efficient, room-temperature-compatible non-Boolean hardware-based solver for hard combinatorial optimization problems.
ISSN:2329-9231