From Utopian to Genuine Unconventional Computers

Collision-based reaction-diffusion computing (RDC) represents information quanta as traveling chemical wave fragments on an excitable medium. Although the medium’s computational ability is certainly increased by utilizing its spatial degrees of freedom [2], our interpretation of collision-based RDC in this paper is that wave fragments travel along ‘limited directions’ ‘instantaneously’ as a result of the ‘fusion of particles’. We do not deal with collision-based computing here, but will deal with conventional silicon architectures of a ‘fusion gate’ inspired by collision-based RDC. The hardware is constructed of a population of collision points, i.e., fusion gates, of electrically equivalent wave fragments and physical wires that connect the fusion gates to each other. We show that i) fundamental logic gates can be constructed by a small number of fusion gates, ii) multiple-input logic gates are constructed in a systematic manner, and iii) the number of transistors in specific logic gates constructed by the proposed method is significantly smaller than that of conventional logic gates while maintaining high-speed and low-power operations.