A 10.8mW Mixed-Signal Simulated Bifurcation Ising Solver using SRAM Compute-In-Memory with 0.6us Time-to-Solution

Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems are funda- mental for various fields ranging from finance to wireless net- works. This work presents a simulated bifurcation (SB) Ising solver in CMOS for NP-hard optimization problems. Analog domain computing led to a superior implementation of this algorithm as inherent and injected noise is required in SB Ising solvers. The architecture novelties include the use of SRAM compute-in-memory (CIM) to accelerate bifurcation as well as the generation and injection of optimal decaying noise in the analog domain. We propose a novel 10-T SRAM cell capable of performing ternary multiplication. When measured with 60- node, 50% density, random, binary MAXCUT graphs, this all- to-all connected Ising solver reliably achieves above 93% of the ground state solution in 0.6us with 10.8mW average power in TSMC 180nm CMOS. Our chip achieves an order of magnitude improvement in time-to-solution and power compared to previously proposed Ising solvers in CMOS and other platforms.