1,032 research outputs found
Memory and information processing in neuromorphic systems
A striking difference between brain-inspired neuromorphic processors and
current von Neumann processors architectures is the way in which memory and
processing is organized. As Information and Communication Technologies continue
to address the need for increased computational power through the increase of
cores within a digital processor, neuromorphic engineers and scientists can
complement this need by building processor architectures where memory is
distributed with the processing. In this paper we present a survey of
brain-inspired processor architectures that support models of cortical networks
and deep neural networks. These architectures range from serial clocked
implementations of multi-neuron systems to massively parallel asynchronous ones
and from purely digital systems to mixed analog/digital systems which implement
more biological-like models of neurons and synapses together with a suite of
adaptation and learning mechanisms analogous to the ones found in biological
nervous systems. We describe the advantages of the different approaches being
pursued and present the challenges that need to be addressed for building
artificial neural processing systems that can display the richness of behaviors
seen in biological systems.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of IEEE, review of recently proposed
neuromorphic computing platforms and system
A dynamic reconfigurable architecture for hybrid spiking and convolutional FPGA-based neural network designs
This work presents a dynamically reconfigurable architecture for Neural Network (NN) accelerators implemented in Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that can be applied in a variety of application scenarios. Although the concept of Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) is increasingly used in NN accelerators, the throughput is usually lower than pure static designs. This work presents a dynamically reconfigurable energy-efficient accelerator architecture that does not sacrifice throughput performance. The proposed accelerator comprises reconfigurable processing engines and dynamically utilizes the device resources according to model parameters. Using the proposed architecture with DPR, different NN types and architectures can be realized on the same FPGA. Moreover, the proposed architecture maximizes throughput performance with design optimizations while considering the available resources on the hardware platform. We evaluate our design with different NN architectures for two different tasks. The first task is the image classification of two distinct datasets, and this requires switching between Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures having different layer structures. The second task requires switching between NN architectures, namely a CNN architecture with high accuracy and throughput and a hybrid architecture that combines convolutional layers and an optimized Spiking Neural Network (SNN) architecture. We demonstrate throughput results from quickly reprogramming only a tiny part of the FPGA hardware using DPR. Experimental results show that the implemented designs achieve a 7× faster frame rate than current FPGA accelerators while being extremely flexible and using comparable resources
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