Organizing data in a specific order, also known as sorting, is a central computing operation performed by a wide range of systems. Conventional hardware systems rely on separate components to store and sort data, which limits their speed and energy efficiency.

Researchers at Peking University have recently developed a new reconfigurable sort-in-memory system that relies on memristors to in-situ sort stored data. Their proposed system, outlined in a paper published in Nature Electronics and led by Professor Yuchao Yang, was found to store and sort data both quickly and energy-efficiently.

“The original idea comes from the fact that although operations like matrix multiplication and convolution have been widely implemented in CIM (Computing-in-Memory) systems, sorting has long been regarded as a ‘hard nut to crack’ in computing-in-memory technology due to its unique computational characteristics,” Yaoyu Tao, corresponding author of the paper, told TechXplore.