China starts mass production of world’s first non-binary AI chip

Spearheaded by Professor Li Hongge’s team at Beihang University in Beijing, this breakthrough overcomes fundamental barriers in traditional computing by merging binary and stochastic logic, enabling unprecedented fault tolerance and power efficiency in intelligent control applications like touch displays and flight systems while sidestepping US chip restrictions.

Today’s chip technologies face two big challenges: the power wall and the architecture wall, Li told the Beijing-based official newspaper Guangming Daily last month.

The power wall stems from a fundamental contradiction – while binary systems are efficient at carrying information, they consume a large amount of power. The architecture wall is caused by the fact that new non-silicon chips cannot easily communicate with traditional systems based on CMOS or complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors.

Li’s team had been exploring alternatives since 2022. Their breakthrough came with the proposal of a new numerical system – Hybrid Stochastic Number (HSN) – which combines traditional binary numbers with stochastic or probability-based numbers.

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Binary logic, the foundation of today’s computing, represents variables using 0s and 1s and relies on precise arithmetic operations. However, large-scale binary computations require extensive hardware resources.

South China Morning Post