Context Awareness for Self-adaptive and Highly Available Production Systems

Part 8: Robotics and ManufacturingInternational audienceA new approach for the realization of self-adaptive and highly available production systems based on a context aware approach, allowing self-adaptation of flexible manufacturing processes in production systems and effective knowledge sharing to support maintenance, is presented. The usage of dynamically changing context as basis for adaptation of flexible manufacturing lines/processes and effective knowledge sharing is proposed. The presented solution includes services for context extraction, adaptation and self-learning allowing high adaptation of production systems depending on the identified context. A generic architecture following Service Oriented Principles is presented allowing for integration of the proposed solution into various production systems. A successful initial application of the developed solution in real world manufacturing environment is presented

A DIN Spec 91345 RAMI 4.0 Compliant Data Pipelining Model: An Approach to Support Data Understanding and Data Acquisition in Smart Manufacturing Environments

Today, data scientists in the manufacturing domain are confronted with various communication standards, protocols and technologies to save and transfer various kinds of data. These circumstances makes it hard to understand, find, access and extract data needed for use case depended applications. One solution could be a data pipelining approach enforced by a semantic model which describes smart manufacturing assets itself and the access to their data along their life-cycle. Many research contributions in smart manufacturing already came out with with reference architectures like the RAMI 4.0 or standards for meta data description or asset classification. Our research builds upon these outcomes and introduces a semantic model based DIN Spec 91345 (RAMI 4.0) compliant data pipelining approach with the smart manufacturing domain as exemplary use case. This paper has a focus on the developed semantic model used to enable an easy data exploration, finding, access and extraction of data, compatible with various used communication standards, protocols and technologies used to save and transfer data.publishersversionpublishe

Dynamic Power Management for Neuromorphic Many-Core Systems

This work presents a dynamic power management architecture for neuromorphic many core systems such as SpiNNaker. A fast dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technique is presented which allows the processing elements (PE) to change their supply voltage and clock frequency individually and autonomously within less than 100 ns. This is employed by the neuromorphic simulation software flow, which defines the performance level (PL) of the PE based on the actual workload within each simulation cycle. A test chip in 28 nm SLP CMOS technology has been implemented. It includes 4 PEs which can be scaled from 0.7 V to 1.0 V with frequencies from 125 MHz to 500 MHz at three distinct PLs. By measurement of three neuromorphic benchmarks it is shown that the total PE power consumption can be reduced by 75%, with 80% baseline power reduction and a 50% reduction of energy per neuron and synapse computation, all while maintaining temporary peak system performance to achieve biological real-time operation of the system. A numerical model of this power management model is derived which allows DVFS architecture exploration for neuromorphics. The proposed technique is to be used for the second generation SpiNNaker neuromorphic many core system

A RISC-V MCU with adaptive reverse body bias and ultra-low-power retention mode in 22 nm FD-SOI

We present a low-power, energy efficient 32-bit RISC-V microprocessor unit (MCU) in 22 nm FD-SOI. It achieves ultra-low leakage,even at high temperatures, by using an adaptive reverse body biasing aware sign-off approach, a low-power optimized physical implementation, and custom SRAM macros with retention mode. We demonstrate the robustness of the chip with measurements over the full industrial temperature range, from -40 {\deg}C to 125 {\deg}C. Our results match the state of the art (SOTA) with 4.8 uW / MHz at 50 MHz in active mode and surpass the SOTA in ultra-low-power retention mode.Comment: accepted at ISOCC 202

VLSI Implementation of a 2.8 Gevent/s Packet-Based AER Interface with Routing and Event Sorting Functionality

State-of-the-art large-scale neuromorphic systems require sophisticated spike event communication between units of the neural network. We present a high-speed communication infrastructure for a waferscale neuromorphic system, based on application-specific neuromorphic communication ICs in an field programmable gate arrays (FPGA)-maintained environment. The ICs implement configurable axonal delays, as required for certain types of dynamic processing or for emulating spike-based learning among distant cortical areas. Measurements are presented which show the efficacy of these delays in influencing behavior of neuromorphic benchmarks. The specialized, dedicated address-event-representation communication in most current systems requires separate, low-bandwidth configuration channels. In contrast, the configuration of the waferscale neuromorphic system is also handled by the digital packet-based pulse channel, which transmits configuration data at the full bandwidth otherwise used for pulse transmission. The overall so-called pulse communication subgroup (ICs and FPGA) delivers a factor 25–50 more event transmission rate than other current neuromorphic communication infrastructures

Neuromorphic Hardware In The Loop: Training a Deep Spiking Network on the BrainScaleS Wafer-Scale System

Emulating spiking neural networks on analog neuromorphic hardware offers several advantages over simulating them on conventional computers, particularly in terms of speed and energy consumption. However, this usually comes at the cost of reduced control over the dynamics of the emulated networks. In this paper, we demonstrate how iterative training of a hardware-emulated network can compensate for anomalies induced by the analog substrate. We first convert a deep neural network trained in software to a spiking network on the BrainScaleS wafer-scale neuromorphic system, thereby enabling an acceleration factor of 10 000 compared to the biological time domain. This mapping is followed by the in-the-loop training, where in each training step, the network activity is first recorded in hardware and then used to compute the parameter updates in software via backpropagation. An essential finding is that the parameter updates do not have to be precise, but only need to approximately follow the correct gradient, which simplifies the computation of updates. Using this approach, after only several tens of iterations, the spiking network shows an accuracy close to the ideal software-emulated prototype. The presented techniques show that deep spiking networks emulated on analog neuromorphic devices can attain good computational performance despite the inherent variations of the analog substrate.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IJCNN 201