UC Santa Barbara

Binary codes and Boolean logic form the foundation of digital computing as we know it. However, the ever-increasing demand for cheap computing power for emerging applications and the advent of novel devices with unique characteristics bring about questions of potential alternatives. This dissertation challenges the status quo by reimagining the established digital/analog boundary and demonstrating how computing with temporal operators can be practical and remarkably efficient.

To this end, the focus is initially on conventional devices. The exploration begins with the idea that digital temporal codes, in which a number is represented by the time that a low to high voltage transition occurs, may, in some cases, be a happy medium between analog and digital binary. To showcase the benefits of this approach, a temporal accelerator for decision trees is developed. The resulting system is built solely with off-the-shelf CMOS components, allows tight integration with sensors, and delivers multiple orders of magnitude energy and performance gains over state-of-the-art solutions.

In the second part of the dissertation, the focus is on post-Moore technologies---specifically, superconductor electronics. Despite their promise as candidates for integrated classical-quantum computers and supercomputers, a fundamental mismatch between traditional computational abstractions and the pulse-based nature of superconductor devices impedes their advancement. Unfortunately, transient voltage pulses do not translate to 0s and 1s as easy as stable voltage levels. Fortunately, temporal operators do not use binary inputs. The advantages of avoiding pulse-to-binary translations at the gate level are highlighted through a series of temporal superconductor designs. Interestingly, these advantages carry over to Boolean superconductor designs by leveraging a newfound duality between temporal and Boolean operators.

The dissertation concludes with a discussion of superconducting information storage in the time domain and the generalization of temporal formalism in a way that allows the specification of both hardware and its properties using the same temporal operators.