Memristor-Based Analog Recursive Computation Circuit for Linear Programming Optimization

Linear programming optimization is central to engineering designs, logistics management, and decision-making in every sector of the economy. Traditional hardware using CPU and GPU platforms for this purpose is severely limited by the scaling of the transistor technology. In this article, we design an analog in-memory computation circuit for accelerating linear programming optimization problems. The scheme includes a memristive crossbar array and analog peripheral circuits that do not require DAC/ADC between each algorithm iteration. In addition, several key parameters related to nonideal device characteristics and interconnect parasitics are discussed for providing practical guidelines. Furthermore, three design schemes are proposed to alleviate the computation error caused by the interconnect resistance for a large-scale crossbar array implementation. Optimal design parameters are quantified under a given number of array size and memristive resistance. Finally, the proposed hardware accelerator and error mitigation techniques are applied to six real-world power system optimization problems. The results show that the average error of generator power and the overall cost is less than 3%. It is demonstrated that the proposed accelerator achieves area, delay, and energy consumption reductions of ~151×, ~33×, and ~21×, respectively, compared with the CMOS digital circuits at the 16-nm technology node for a 1000 × 1000 array with 6-bit precision.