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MorphIC: Binary-Wt NeuroProcessor with Stochastic Spike-Driven Online Learning (arxiv.org)
1 point by godelmachine on Apr 19, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A four-core chip stores every connection between its spiking brain cells as a single on/off bit and learns on the device by randomly nudging those bits when spikes arrive, packing synapses very densely. On handwritten digit recognition it gave a ten times better area-versus-accuracy tradeoff than earlier spiking chips, with no extra energy cost.

Abstract · MorphIC: A 65-nm 738k-Synapse/mm$^2$ Quad-Core Binary-Weight Digital Neuromorphic Processor with Stochastic Spike-Driven Online Learning

Recent trends in the field of neural network accelerators investigate weight quantization as a means to increase the resource- and power-efficiency of hardware devices. As full on-chip weight storage is necessary to avoid the high energy cost of off-chip memory accesses, memory reduction requirements for weight storage pushed toward the use of binary weights, which were demonstrated to have a limited accuracy reduction on many applications when quantization-aware training techniques are used. In parallel, spiking neural network (SNN) architectures are explored to further reduce power when processing sparse event-based data streams, while on-chip spike-based online learning appears as a key feature for applications constrained in power and resources during the training phase. However, designing power- and area-efficient spiking neural networks still requires the development of specific techniques in order to leverage on-chip online learning on binary weights without compromising the synapse density. In this work, we demonstrate MorphIC, a quad-core binary-weight digital neuromorphic processor embedding a stochastic version of the spike-driven synaptic plasticity (S-SDSP) learning rule and a hierarchical routing fabric for large-scale chip interconnection. The MorphIC SNN processor embeds a total of 2k leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons and more than two million plastic synapses for an active silicon area of 2.86mm$^2$ in 65nm CMOS, achieving a high density of 738k synapses/mm$^2$. MorphIC demonstrates an order-of-magnitude improvement in the area-accuracy tradeoff on the MNIST classification task compared to previously-proposed SNNs, while having no penalty in the energy-accuracy tradeoff.

Charlotte Frenkel, Jean-Didier Legat, David Bol
arXiv:1904.08513 · cs.NE, cs.ET · submitted Apr 17, 2019 · updated Jul 16, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · This document is the paper as accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems journal (2019), the fully-edited paper is available at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8764001

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