Special AEP Seminar: Marc Serra-Garcia (AMOLF)

Physical computing in elastic metamaterials

There is a significant range of physical phenomena – from nonlinear elasticity, to symmetry, noise, topology, and disorder – that are rarely utilized in traditional computing paradigms. Yet these phenomena can unlock new efficiencies, by directly processing signals in their natural domain, and by bypassing the traditional abstraction stack associated with digital CMOS technology. However, building physical computers is challenging. Information processing tasks generally involve complex input-output relations, thus requiring designs that are highly expressive; and for these designs, the relation between function and structure is nontrivial, complicating the simulation, design, and fabrication of devices. In my talk, I will illustrate our journey towards using metamaterials for physical computing, with two recent examples. First, I will talk about our results in passive speech recognition, where we leverage a phononic metamaterial to implement wake-up-word detection with zero standby power consumption. Second, I will discuss our ongoing work in self-learning materials, that autonomously adapt to improve their performance – driven by their ability to form long-term memories in response to examples and external feedback.

Bio: Marc Serra-Garcia is a tenure-track group leader at the AMOLF research institute in Amsterdam. After a B.Sc. in physics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, he did a M.Sc. degree at Caltech, and a Ph.D. at ETH Zurich. His research is currently focused on novel (beyond-CMOS) approaches to information processing, with the goal of using a richer and more diverse set of physical phenomena to implement relevant information-processing tasks with low power. The research has been recognized by an ERC Starting grant, and various other grants from the Dutch Research Council and Swiss National Science Foundation.