Comment by danielheath

I know someone working in this direction; they've described the big challenges as:

  * Finding ways to use extant chip fab technology to produce something that can do analog logic. I've heard CMOS flash presented a plausible option.
  * Designing something that isn't an antenna.
  * You would likely have to finetune your model for each physical chip you're running it on (the manufacturing tolerances aren't going to give exact results)

The big advantage is that instead of using 16 wires to represent a float16, you use the voltage on 1 wire to represent that number (which plausibly has far more precision than a float32). Additionally, you can e.g. wire two values directly together rather than loading numbers into an ALU, so the die space & power savings are potentially many, many orders of magnitude.