- Chen, Zihao;
- Xiao, Zhili;
- Akl, Mahmoud;
- Leugring, Johannes;
- Olajide, Omowuyi;
- Malik, Adil;
- Dennler, Nik;
- Harper, Chad;
- Bose, Subhankar;
- Gonzalez, Hector;
- Samaali, Mohamed;
- Liu, Gengting;
- Eshraghian, Jason;
- Pignari, Riccardo;
- Urgese, Gianvito;
- Andreou, Andreas;
- Shankar, Sadasivan;
- Mayr, Christian;
- Cauwenberghs, Gert;
- Chakrabartty, Shantanu
We introduce NeuroSA, a neuromorphic architecture specifically designed to ensure asymptotic convergence to the ground state of an Ising problem using a Fowler-Nordheim quantum mechanical tunneling based threshold-annealing process. The core component of NeuroSA consists of a pair of asynchronous ON-OFF neurons, which effectively map classical simulated annealing dynamics onto a network of integrate-and-fire neurons. The threshold of each ON-OFF neuron pair is adaptively adjusted by an FN annealer and the resulting spiking dynamics replicates the optimal escape mechanism and convergence of SA, particularly at low-temperatures. To validate the effectiveness of our neuromorphic Ising machine, we systematically solved benchmark combinatorial optimization problems such as MAX-CUT and Max Independent Set. Across multiple runs, NeuroSA consistently generates distribution of solutions that are concentrated around the state-of-the-art results (within 99%) or surpass the current state-of-the-art solutions for Max Independent Set benchmarks. Furthermore, NeuroSA is able to achieve these superior distributions without any graph-specific hyperparameter tuning. For practical illustration, we present results from an implementation of NeuroSA on the SpiNNaker2 platform, highlighting the feasibility of mapping our proposed architecture onto a standard neuromorphic accelerator platform.