Abstract
Digitalization of society creates important quantities of data that have been increasing at an exponential rate during the past few years. Despite the tremendous technological progress, digital computers have trouble meeting the demand, especially for challenging tasks involving artificial intelligence or optimization problems. The fundamental reason comes from the architecture of digital computers which separates the processor and memory and slows down computations due to undesired data transfers, the so-called von Neumann bottleneck. To avoid unnecessary data movement, various computing paradigms have been proposed that merge processor and memory such as neuromorphic architectures that take inspiration from the brain and physically implement artificial neural networks. Furthermore, rethinking digital operations and using analog physical laws to compute has the potential to accelerate some tasks at a low energy cost.This dissertation aims to explore an energy-efficient physical computing approach based on analog oscillatory neural networks (ONN). In particular, this dissertation unveils (1) the performances of ONN based on vanadium dioxide oscillating neurons with resistive synapses, (2) a novel mixed-signal and scalable ONN architecture that computes in the analog domain and propagates the information digitally, and (3) how ONNs can tackle combinatorial optimization problems whose complexity scale exponentially with the problem size. The dissertation concludes with discussions of some promising future research directions.