The yes/no nature of binary computing is fine for such tasks as operating systems, databases and spreadsheets, Vigoda said in an interview with eWEEK. But many applications that are becoming ubiquitous in today’s world—from fraud detection and financial modeling to genome sequencing and search—are not looking for the yes/no answers, but rather the best guess answer from among any number of possibilities.
Digital processors, such as those developed by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, can do these probability calculations, but in an extremely inefficient manner, Vigoda said. As a result, such calculations call for huge amounts of processing power, space and money. With Lyric Semiconductor, Vigoda and other company officials are looking to create a new processing environment that calculates such probabilities much more quickly and efficiently.
Lyric, an MIT-spinoff that is funded through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and venture capital firms, came out of stealth mode Aug. 17 with the first of its commercial products based on its new computer circuitry, LEC (Lyric Error Correction) for Flash memory, a technology that can be found in everything from smartphones and cameras to servers and storage devices.
The 65-nanometer LEC chip, manufactured by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., will help alleviate the ECC bottleneck found in Flash memory, Vigoda said. Currently, one in every 1,000 bits of storage in Flash memory comes out wrong when the memory is read, he said. In addition, as density is increased in Flash memory, so are error rates.
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