ATC: Approximate Temporal Coding for Efficient Implementations of Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) update their neurons' states, the most energy consuming action, only after receiving or firing spikes for energy efficiency. So reducing the number of spikes would lead to more efficient SNN implementations. We propose an approximate temporal coding (ATC) for this purpose. Because the reduction of spikes leads to more synapses being used rarely, we develop a pruning method for further energy improvement. Experimental results validate the efficiency of ATC and the pruning method. On the MNIST dataset, for example, 61% of the spikes are reduced, leading to 60% energy saving without any accuracy loss.