Neuromorphic Spintronics

Neuromorphic spintronics combines two advanced fields in technology, neuromorphic computing and spintronics, to create brain-inspired, efficient computing systems that leverage the unique properties of the electron's spin. In this book chapter, we first introduce both fields - neuromorphic computing and spintronics and then make a case for neuromorphic spintronics. We discuss concrete examples of neuromorphic spintronics, including computing based on fluctuations, artificial neural networks, and reservoir computing, highlighting their potential to revolutionize computational efficiency and functionality.

Task Agnostic Metrics for Reservoir Computing

Physical reservoir computing is a computational paradigm that enables temporal pattern recognition to be performed directly in physical matter. By exciting non-linear dynamical systems and linearly classifying their changes in state, we can create highly energy-efficient devices capable of solving machine learning tasks without the need to build a modular system consisting of millions of neurons interconnected by synapses. The chosen dynamical system must have three desirable properties: non-linearity, complexity, and fading memory to act as an effective reservoir. We present task agnostic quantitative measures for each of these three requirements and exemplify them for two reservoirs: an echo state network and a simulated magnetic skyrmion-based reservoir. We show that, in general, systems with lower damping reach higher values in all three performance metrics. Whilst for input signal strength, there is a natural trade-off between memory capacity and non-linearity of the reservoir's behaviour. In contrast to typical task-dependent reservoir computing benchmarks, these metrics can be evaluated in parallel from a single input signal, drastically speeding up the parameter search to design efficient and high-performance reservoirs.