A CMOS Compatible Bistable Resistively-coupled Ising Machine-BRIM

Ising machines and other nature-based computing platforms have recently become attractive due to their potential of outperforming conventional computers when solving problems that involve a large number of competing alternatives, such as combinatorial optimizations. In this paper, a newly proposed resistively-coupled Ising machine with bistable nodes (BRIM) is designed and simulated in a 45nm CMOS process. The performance of the proposed machine is evaluated based on its capability of solving the Max-cut graph problem. A spin-fix annealing technique is applied to help escape local minima and improve the solution quality. Simulation result shows that this technique effectively increases the probability of finding the Max-cut solution by 50.5% and reduces the solution error to 1.73 on average.