Description
Full description: https://www.zurich.ibm.com/careers/2024_028.html
We are seeking a highly motivated candidate for a PhD or Postdoc position in the project CheCoA – “Chemical Computing Architectures”, a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Leveraging chemical reactions for computing has emerged as a promising paradigm. For example, chemical computing using the oscillating Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction can be used to construct simple linearly-bounded Turing machines by storing information in its oscillation state [1]. Due to the low energy consumption and molecular dimension of chemical reactions, the chemical computing paradigm offers the benefit of high energy efficiency and massive parallelism. Our approach of bringing together silicon microfabrication technology and chemical computing is an unexplored yet straightforward path to investigate the potential of miniaturized chemical computing. In first experiments comprising networks of reservoirs with connecting channels, waves of the oscillating chemistry were observed to exhibit complex behaviour depending on the state of the input to the network.
We will build on these early results and explore new ways to handle chemical reactions in microscopic compartments, to read and manipulate them via light and electro-chemical signals, and to establish the transport of information between them. The vision is to create a computing scheme that relies solely on molecules for computation and thus operates at molecular efficiency, that is, close to the fundamental limit of energy consumption.
Specifically, the project could entail:
Screening and optimization of the chemistry.
Designing new experiments using existing models of the chemistry.
Fabricating next generation silicon chips with improved functionality.
Performing compute experiments using light and/or electrodes for readout and programming.
Understanding on-chip chemical behavior.
Optimize all aspects towards optimal compute performance.
You will be part of an interdisciplinary team working in the ‘Physics and Science for Information’ group at IBM Research GmbH, Rüschlikon, Switzerland. You will be mentored by Dr. Heiko Wolf and Dr. Armin Knoll. Part of the project is in collaboration with Harvard University.
The successful candidate will enjoy an internationally competitive salary and work with collaborative and creative groups in an exclusive research environment.
The project should start in the first half of 2025.
About IBM Research Zurich
Our mission at IBM Research has always been to invent what’s next in computing.
It’s why IBM researchers have authored more than 110,000 publications. It’s why they are regularly featured in the world’s most prestigious journals and conferences, and it’s why their awards include six Nobel Prizes, ten Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science, and six Turing Awards.
Today, IBM Research stands at the forefront of computing. Our semiconductor research is pushing the limits of scaling and redefining the way chips are designed; we’re creating new foundation models and hardware for the next generation of enterprise AI; we’re a world leader in quantum computing; and we’re envisioning a multi-cloud platform where diverse computing environments function as one.
