Computer Engineering Commons^™

Improving The Efficiency Of Dnn Hardware Accelerator By Replacing Digitalfeature Extractor With An Imprecise Neuromorphic Hardware, Majid Mohammadi Rad, Omid Sojodishijani

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Mixed-signal in-memory computation can drastically improve the efficiency of the hardware implementing machine learning (ML) algorithms by (i) removing the need to fetch neural network parameters from internal or external memory and (ii) performing a large number of multiply-accumulate operations in parallel. However, this boost in efficiency comes with some disadvantages. Among them, the inability to precisely program nonvolatile memory devices (NVM) with neural network parameters and sensitivity to noise prevent the mixed-signal hardware to perform a precise and deterministic computation. Unfortunately, these hardware-specific errors can get magnified while propagating along with the layers of the deep neural network. In …