Opportunities in physical computing driven by analog realization

Abstract

In the past, discussions on the capability of analog or physical computing were only of theoretical interest. Digital computation's 80 year history starts from the Turings original model of computation to ubiquitous modern computational devices. The modern development of analog computation started with almost zero computational framework. Today, we have significant programmable and configurable physical computing systems. The focus of this paper is to have these discussions given the very real potential of ultra-low power physical computing systems. This work considers the current state of analog computation, energy efficient computation, and analog numerical analysis, moving towards starting a unified analog-computing framework, including quantum computing, as part of physical computing.