Biblio

In this special discussion session on machine learning, the panel members discuss various issues related to building secure and low power neuromorphic systems. The security of neuromorphic systems may be discussed in term of the reliability of the model, trust in the model, and security of the underlying hardware. The low power aspect of neuromorphic computing systems may be discussed in terms of adaptation of new devices and technologies, the adaptation of new computational models, development of heterogeneous computing frameworks, or dedicated engines for processing neuromorphic models. This session may include discussion on the design space of such supporting hardware, exploring tradeoffs between power/energy, security, scalability, hardware area, performance, and accuracy.

The phenomenon of metal-insulator-transition (MIT) in strongly correlated oxides, such as NbO2, have shown the oscillation behavior in recent experiments. In this work, the MIT based two-terminal device is proposed as a compact oscillation neuron for the parallel read operation from the resistive synaptic array. The weighted sum is represented by the frequency of the oscillation neuron. Compared to the complex CMOS integrate-and-fire neuron with tens of transistors, the oscillation neuron achieves significant area reduction, thereby alleviating the column pitch matching problem of the peripheral circuitry in resistive memories. Firstly, the impact of MIT device characteristics on the weighted sum accuracy is investigated when the oscillation neuron is connected to a single resistive synaptic device. Secondly, the array-level performance is explored when the oscillation neurons are connected to the resistive synaptic array. To address the interference of oscillation between columns in simple cross-point arrays, a 2-transistor-1-resistor (2T1R) array architecture is proposed at negligible increase in array area. Finally, the circuit-level benchmark of the proposed oscillation neuron with the CMOS neuron is performed. At single neuron node level, oscillation neuron shows textgreater12.5X reduction of area. At 128×128 array level, oscillation neuron shows a reduction of ˜4% total area, textgreater30% latency, ˜5X energy and ˜40X leakage power, demonstrating its advantage of being integrated into the resistive synaptic array for neuro-inspired computing.