Burst synchronization in two pulse-coupled resonate-and-fire neuron circuits

The present paper addresses burst synchronization in out of phase observed in two pulse-coupled resonate-and-fire neuron (RFN) circuits. The RFN circuit is a silicon spiking neuron that has second-order membrane dynamics and exhibits fast subthreshold oscillation of membrane potential. Due to such dynamics, the behavior of the RFN circuit is sensitive to the timing of stimuli. We investigated the effects of the sensitivity and the mutual interaction on the dynamic behavior of two pulse-coupled RFN circuits, and will demonstrate out of phase burst synchronization and bifurcation phenomena through circuit simulations.Applications in Artificial Intelligence - ApplicationsRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Burst synchronization in two pulse-coupled resonate-and-fire neuron circuits

The present paper addresses burst synchronization in out of phase observed in two pulse-coupled resonate-and-fire neuron (RFN) circuits. The RFN circuit is a silicon spiking neuron that has second-order membrane dynamics and exhibits fast subthreshold oscillation of membrane potential. Due to such dynamics, the behavior of the RFN circuit is sensitive to the timing of stimuli. We investigated the effects of the sensitivity and the mutual interaction on the dynamic behavior of two pulse-coupled RFN circuits, and will demonstrate out of phase burst synchronization and bifurcation phenomena through circuit simulations.Applications in Artificial Intelligence - ApplicationsRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Energy Efficient Spintronic Device for Neuromorphic Computation

Future computing will require significant development in new computing device paradigms. This is motivated by CMOS devices reaching their technological limits, the need for non-Von Neumann architectures as well as the energy constraints of wearable technologies and embedded processors. The first device proposal, an energy-efficient voltage-controlled domain wall device for implementing an artificial neuron and synapse is analyzed using micromagnetic modeling. By controlling the domain wall motion utilizing spin transfer or spin orbit torques in association with voltage generated strain control of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy in the presence of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), different positions of the domain wall are realized in the free layer of a magnetic tunnel junction to program different synaptic weights. Additionally, an artificial neuron can be realized by combining this DW device with a CMOS buffer. The second neuromorphic device proposal is inspired by the brain. Membrane potential of many neurons oscillate in a subthreshold damped fashion and fire when excited by an input frequency that nearly equals their Eigen frequency. We investigate theoretical implementation of such “resonate-and-fire” neurons by utilizing the magnetization dynamics of a fixed magnetic skyrmion based free layer of a magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ). Voltage control of magnetic anisotropy or voltage generated strain results in expansion and shrinking of a skyrmion core that mimics the subthreshold oscillation. Finally, we show that such resonate and fire neurons have potential application in coupled nanomagnetic oscillator based associative memory arrays

Stochastic Domain Wall-Magnetic Tunnel Junction Artificial Neurons for Noise-Resilient Spiking Neural Networks

The spatiotemporal nature of neuronal behavior in spiking neural networks (SNNs) make SNNs promising for edge applications that require high energy efficiency. To realize SNNs in hardware, spintronic neuron implementations can bring advantages of scalability and energy efficiency. Domain wall (DW) based magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) devices are well suited for probabilistic neural networks given their intrinsic integrate-and-fire behavior with tunable stochasticity. Here, we present a scaled DW-MTJ neuron with voltage-dependent firing probability. The measured behavior was used to simulate a SNN that attains accuracy during learning compared to an equivalent, but more complicated, multi-weight (MW) DW-MTJ device. The validation accuracy during training was also shown to be comparable to an ideal leaky integrate and fire (LIF) device. However, during inference, the binary DW-MTJ neuron outperformed the other devices after gaussian noise was introduced to the Fashion-MNIST classification task. This work shows that DW-MTJ devices can be used to construct noise-resilient networks suitable for neuromorphic computing on the edge.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure