Newsletter Fall 2015 President Obama Highlights Boise State’s Innovative Culture By: Sherry Squires President Barack Obama highlighted innovation at Boise State during his remarks when he visited campus in January. “Here at Boise State innovation is a culture that you’re building,” President Obama said. “And you’re also partnering with companies to do two things — you help students graduate with skills that employers are looking for, and you help employees pick up the skills they need to advance on the job … it’s contributing to the economic development of the city and the state, as well as being good for the students.” Boise State was the President’s first stop after his 2015 State of the Union address. Before delivering his speech on campus, the President visited Boise State’s College of Engineering and the New Product Development Lab, a collaborative effort housed in engineering and managed by the College of Business and Economics. continued on page 5
Startup Licenses Technology Developed at Boise State By: Kathleen Tuck A newly launched company called Knowm Inc., a start-up that pioneers nextgeneration advanced computing architectures and technology, plans to build and commercialize the world’s first adaptive neuromemristive processor. That dream is based in part on memristor technology developed by Kris Campbell, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boise State University. Memristors are tiny electronic devices that remember and respond, mimicking synapses in the human brain. Photo: Knowm Inc.
Knowm recently announced the commercial availability of its first products, including discrete memristor chips. The company is licensing Campbell’s memristor technology from Boise State and the product will be prepared in the university’s Idaho Microfabrication Lab in the College of Engineering. The technology is aimed at overcoming Moore’s Law, which is the observation made in 1965 that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits has doubled every year. “We’ve reached a tipping point in computing as the market is discovering the exciting potential of artificial intelligence applications, while concurrently Moore’s Law is being halted in its tracks due to physical size limitations of transistors,” said Tim Molter, CTO, Knowm Inc. “With Thermodynamic RAM (kT-RAM), we will see a quantum leap in power, speed and size metrics, leaving competing technologies far behind.”
The company believes this new synaptic processor (kT-RAM) will allow for higher performance computing tasks to be undertaken while maintaining manageable power and infrastructure costs for more advanced applications. “If big data has taught us anything, it’s that there are limitations in performing at scale, particularly with projects requiring the use of machine learning to perform complex tasks in near real-time, such as the detection of security anomalies within petabytes of network traffic,” said Brad Shimmin, service director for business technology and software at Current Analysis. “Knowm’s unique approach to ‘soft-hardware’ with neuromemristive processors presents the industry with some intriguing opportunities to create highly differentiated applications of advanced analytics capable of scaling to meet even the most extreme data requirements.” continued on page 7