Probabilistic Circuit Implementation Based on P-Bits Using the Intrinsic Random Property of RRAM and P-Bit Multiplexing Strategy

Micromachines (Basel). 2022 Jun 10;13(6):924. doi: 10.3390/mi13060924.

Abstract

Probabilistic computing is an emerging computational paradigm that uses probabilistic circuits to efficiently solve optimization problems such as invertible logic, where traditional digital computations are difficult to solve. This paper proposes a true random number generator (TRNG) based on resistive random-access memory (RRAM), which is combined with an activation function implemented by a piecewise linear function to form a standard p-bit cell, one of the most important parts of a p-circuit. A p-bit multiplexing strategy is also applied to reduce the number of p-bits and improve resource utilization. To verify the superiority of the proposed probabilistic circuit, we implement the invertible p-circuit on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), including AND gates, full adders, multi-bit adders, and multipliers. The results of the FPGA implementation show that our approach can significantly save the consumption of hardware resources.

Keywords: TRNG based on RRAM; invertible logic; multiplexing strategy; p-bits; p-circuits.