Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM)s Applications for Neuro-inspired Computing and Hardware Security

RRAM technology has made significant progresses in the past few years as a competitive candidate for the next generation non-volatile memory (NVM). In this talk, I will disucss RRAM's new applications beyond NVM for neuro-inspired computing and hardware security. Firstly, I will show an experimental demonstration of RRAM synaptic weights tuning capability for offline and online training. Secondly, I will introduce the "NeuroSim" simulator, a device-circuit-algorithm co-design framework to study the impact of non-ideal synaptic device behaviors on the learning accuracy at the system-level, here the MNIST handwritten dataset and the multilayer perceptron algorithm are used for the case-study. Furthermore, I will discuss the challenges of scaling up the synaptic crossbar array from the circuit and architecture perspective and show a demonstration of binary neural network in a 16 Mb RRAM macro prototype chip. Lastly, I will introduce how to leverage the RRAM variability as physical unclonable function (PUF) for device authentication and cryptographic key generation.
Shimeng Yu received the B.S. degree in microelectronics from Peking University, Beijing, China in 2009, and the M.S. degree and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA in 2011, and in 2013, respectively. He is currently an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer engineering at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

His research interests are emerging nano-devices and circuits with a focus on the resistive memories for different applications including brain-inspired neuromorphic computing, hardware security, monolithic 3D integration, and radiation-hard electronics, etc. He has published >50 journal papers and >90 conference papers with citations >3700 and H-index 28.

Among this honors, he is a recipient of the Stanford Graduate Fellowship from 2009 to 2012, the IEEE Electron Devices Society Masters Student Fellowship in 2010, the IEEE Electron Devices Society PhD Student Fellowship in 2012, the DOD-DTRA Young Investigator Award in 2015, and the NSF Faculty Early CAREER Award in 2016.