Startup's Probability Processor Could Revolutionize Computing

Binary logic has been at the heart of digital computing since its infancy. But Lyric Semiconductor thinks it can change all that with a new technology called probability processing that it's betting could revolutionize everything from financial modeling to spam filtering.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based startup is the brainchild of MIT Ph.D. Ben Vigoda and semiconductor industry veteran David Reynolds. The MIT spin-off emerged from stealth mode Tuesday at the Flash Memory Summit and the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design to trumpet its technology. It has received more than $20 million in government funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other agencies and venture investment from Stata Venture Partners.

Digital computers represent data in ones and zeroes. In Boolean logic -- used in all computers so far -- the ones and zeroes act as on/off switches, completing a circuit if the input is true and breaking a circuit if the input is false. Lyric said it has invented a new kind of logic gate circuit that uses transistors as dimmer switches rather than on/off switches. According to Lyric, these circuits can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between zero and one, directly representing probabilities.

That could represent a breakthrough in modern computing because probabilities are at the core of so many applications, from search to fraud detection, spam filtering, financial modeling, genome sequence analysis and more. By redesigning processing circuits from the ground up to natively process probabilities -- from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language -- Lyric said many applications that today require a thousand conventional processors will run on just one Lyric processor, providing 1,000X efficiencies in cost, power and size.

The first commercial application of probability processing is Lyric Error Correction (LEC) for flash memory, which Lyric said is available for immediate licensing.

Flash memory, the basis for solid-state storage in devices like PDAs, laptops, digital audio players and mobile phones, stores information using memory cells made from floating-gate transistors -- essentially areas of charge trapped on their surface. But because those charged areas are inherently unstable, error-checking chips are used to detect whether the stored values have changed and to provide correction when processing the data.

According to Lyric, flash error rates have become increasingly problematic with each new generation of the technology. Today, about one in every 1,000 bits stored in flash memory is an error. But as flash companies increase overall flash density to create larger solid-state drives, the error rates increase. Lyric said the error numbers will approach one in 100 in the next generation of drives, making error correction a serious processing bottleneck.

LEC is Lyric's solution. Lyric said LEC offers a 30X reduction in die size and a 12X improvement in power consumption, all at higher throughput compared with today's digital solutions.

After LEC, Lyric said its next focus is the development of a general-purpose programmable probability processing platform that it calls GP5. It will run code written in Lyric's own probability programming language called Probability Synthesis to Bayesian Logic (PSBL), which Lyric said is an expressive computer programming language for working with probability-based computations. Lyric aims to begin sampling the first GP5 in 2013.

"After a decade of development, we have no shortage of opportunities for our probability processing technology, but we are currently focused on a modest list of both short- and long-term applications that will see enormous gains in performance," Vigoda said in a statement. "We are starting with Lyric Error Correction but ultimately plan to develop a more general-purpose probability processor that will truly change the landscape for many applications."

Thor Olavsrud is a contributor to InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.