17 August 2010
Lyric unveils 'breakthrough' error correction technology for Flash memories
Lyric Semiconductor has announced a new technology called probability processing, which it claims is poised to deliver a 'fundamental change' in processing performance and power consumption.
Following over a decade of development, Lyric, a DARPA and venture-funded MIT spinout, says its probability processing technology calculates in a completely new way, enabling orders-of-magnitude improvement in processor efficiency. According to the company, Lyric Error Correction (LEC) for Flash memory is the first commercial application of probability processing and offers a 30X reduction in die size, as well as 12X improvement in power consumption, all at higher throughput compared to today's digital solutions.
In a statement, the company said it is redesigning processing circuits from the ground up to natively process probabilities, from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language. "As a result," the statement said, "many applications that today require a thousand conventional processors will soon run in just one Lyric processor, providing 1,000X efficiencies in cost, power, and size."
Traditionally, computers have been based on digital computing principles, with data represented as bits. Boolean logic gates perform operations on these bits. Lyric claims to have invented a new kind of logic gate circuit that uses transistors as dimmer switches instead of as on/off switches. These circuits are said to accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities - levels of certainty.
A digital processor steps through these operations serially in order to perform a function. In order to improve efficiency even further, Lyric's processors are designed to perform many probability computations in parallel.
According to Lyric's ceo and co-founder, Ben Vigoda (pictured), the company's approach can accelerate search, fraud detection, spam filtering, financial modeling, genome sequence analysis, and many other applications that involve simultaneously considering many possible alternatives and deciding on the best fit.
"After a decade of development, we have no shortage of opportunities for our probability processing technology, but we are currently focused on a modest list of both short and long term applications that will see enormous gains in performance," sid Vigoda. "We are starting with Lyric Error Correction but ultimately plan to develop a more general purpose probability processor that will truly change the landscape for many applications."
Author
Chris Shaw
Supporting Information
Websites
http://www.lyricsemiconductor.com
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