Exploring Neuromorphic Computing Based on Spiking Neural Networks: Algorithms to Hardware

Neuromorphic Computing, a concept pioneered in the late 1980s, is receiving a lot of attention lately due to its promise of reducing the computational energy, latency, as well as learning complexity in artificial neural networks. Taking inspiration from neuroscience, this interdisciplinary field performs a multi-stack optimization across devices, circuits, and algorithms by providing an end-to-end approach to achieving brain-like efficiency in machine intelligence. On one side, neuromorphic computing introduces a new algorithmic paradigm, known as Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which is a significant shift from standard deep learning and transmits information as spikes (“1” or “0”) rather than analog values. This has opened up novel algorithmic research directions to formulate methods to represent data in spike-trains, develop neuron models that can process information over time, design learning algorithms for event-driven dynamical systems, and engineer network architectures amenable to sparse, asynchronous, event-driven computing to achieve lower power consumption. On the other side, a parallel research thrust focuses on development of efficient computing platforms for new algorithms. Standard accelerators that are amenable to deep learning workloads are not particularly suitable to handle processing across multiple timesteps efficiently. To that effect, researchers have designed neuromorphic hardware that rely on event-driven sparse computations as well as efficient matrix operations. While most large-scale neuromorphic systems have been explored based on CMOS technology, recently, Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technologies show promise toward implementing bio-mimetic functionalities on single devices. In this article, we outline several strides that neuromorphic computing based on spiking neural networks (SNNs) has taken over the recent past, and we present our outlook on the challenges that this field needs to overcome to make the bio-plausibility route a successful one.