Taming non-equilibrium thermal fluctuations in subthreshold CMOS circuits

Abstract

As CMOS technology scales down, thermal fluctuations increasingly impact circuit behavior, posing challenges to conventional circuit design. However, the inherent stochasticity introduced by thermal noise is now being explored as a potential resource in the emerging field of probabilistic computing. This work presents a fully CMOS experimental platform that enables direct control over its intrinsic thermal fluctuations. These devices function as programmable multivariate Gaussian samplers, offering a hardware primitive for energy-efficient stochastic computing and serving as an experimental platform for studies in electronic noise and stochastic thermodynamics.