Neural Hardware

The Sensors Group neuromorphic digital AI deep neural network accelerators exploit key notions of sparse brain computing inspired by the brain's Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to save energy and time.  Our CNN accelerators NullHop and its descendants exploit activation sparsity and our multiple generations of RNN accelerators DeltaRNN, EdgeDRNN, and Spartus exploit temporal sparsity and weight sparsity. 

Like in SNNs, the computations become driven by activity, but unlike SNNs, our accelerators access memory predictably.

Key concepts

Instead of computing all units for each input sample, why not only update the ones that have activity?

This idea can lead to embedded IP blocks that access a lot less memory (and burn less energy), but in a predictable way that matches with DRAM requirements. 

Key publications in Neural Network Hardware

Reviews

Shih-Chii Liu, Sheng Zhou, Zixiao Li, Chang Gao, Kwantae Kim and Tobi Delbruck, 2024. "Bringing Dynamic Sparsity to the Forefront for Low-Power Audio Edge Computing: Brain-inspired approach for sparsifying network updates", *IEEE Solid-State Circuits Mag*,  16(4),  62-69. 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MSSC.2024.3455290.


Liu, Shih-Chii, Chang Gao, Kwantae Kim, and Tobi Delbruck. 2022. “Energy-Efficient Activity-Driven Computing Architectures for Edge Intelligence.” In *2022 International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM)*, 21.2.1–21.2.4. doi:10.1109/IEDM45625.2022.10019443. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IEDM45625.2022.10019443.

Tobi Delbruck and Shih-Chii Liu. 2019. “Data-Driven Neuromorphic DRAM-Based CNN and RNN Accelerators.” In *2019 53rd Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers*, 500–506. doi:10.1109/IEEECONF44664.2019.9048865. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IEEECONF44664.2019.9048865.


Research papers

Kwantae Kim, Chang Gao, Rui Graça, Ilya Kiselev, Hoi-Jun Yoo, Tobi Delbruck, and Shih-Chii Liu. 2022. “A 23-μW Keyword Spotting IC With Ring-Oscillator-Based Time-Domain Feature Extraction.” *IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits* 57 (11) (November): 3298–3311. doi:10.1109/JSSC.2022.3195610. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JSSC.2022.3195610 .

Xi Chen, Chang Gao, Tobi Delbruck, and Shih-Chii Liu. 2021. “EILE: Efficient Incremental Learning on the Edge.” In *2021 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems (AICAS)*, 1–4. ieeexplore.ieee.org. doi:10.1109/AICAS51828.2021.9458554. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/AICAS51828.2021.9458554.


Chang Gao, Tobi Delbruck, and Shih-Chii Liu. 2022. “Spartus: A 9.4 TOp/s FPGA-Based LSTM Accelerator Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Sparsity.” *IEEE Trans Neural Netw Learn Syst*. arXiv. doi:10.1109/TNNLS.2022.3180209. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2022.3180209.


Chang Gao, Antonio Rios-Navarro, Xi Chen, Shih-Chii Liu and Tobi Delbruck. 2020. “EdgeDRNN: Recurrent Neural Network Accelerator for Edge Inference.” *IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems* 10 (4) (December): 419–432. doi:10.1109/JETCAS.2020.3040300. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JETCAS.2020.3040300.

Alessandro Aimar, Hesham Mostafa, Enrico Calabrese, Antonio Rios-Navarro, Ricardo Tapiador-Morales, Iulia-Alexandra Lungu, Moritz B. Milde, et al. 2019. “NullHop: A Flexible Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on Sparse Representations of Feature Maps.” *IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems* 30 (3) (March): 644–656. doi:10.1109/TNNLS.2018.2852335. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2018.2852335.


Chang Gao, Daniel Neil, Enea Ceolini, Shih-Chii Liu, and Tobi Delbruck. 2018. “DeltaRNN: A Power-Efficient Recurrent Neural Network Accelerator.” In *Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays*, 21–30. FPGA ’18. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. doi:10.1145/3174243.3174261. https://doi.org/10.1145/3174243.3174261.


PhD theses

Neuromorphic Processor Project

NPP Phase 2

Phase 2 of the Samsung Global Research Neuromorphic Processor Project (aka NPP) concluded officially in 2019, but we are still pursuing the aims of this project.

NPP developed theory, architectures, and digital implementations targeting specific applications of deep neural network technology in vision and audition. This project aims towards real-time, low-power, brain-inspired solutions targeted at full-custom SoC integration. A particular aim of the NPP was to develop efficient data-driven deep neural network architectures that can enable always-on operation on battery-powered mobile devices in conjunction with event-driven sensors.

The project team includes leading academic partners in the USA, Canada, and Spain. The project is coordinated by the Inst. of Neuroinformatics. The overall PI of the project was Tobi Delbruck.

The NPP Phase 2 partners included

NPP Phase 1

In Phase 1 of NPP, we worked with Samsung and partners from Canada, USA, and Spain to develop deep inference theory and processor architectures with state of the art power efficiency. Several key hardware accelerator results inspired by neuromorphic design principles were obtained by the Sensors group. These results exploit sparsity of neural activation in space and time to reduce computation and particularly expensive memory access to external memory, which costs hundreds of times more energy that local memory access or arithmetic operations. That way, these DNN accelerators are like synchronous spiking neural networks.

Key results

NPP Phase 1 partners

Other key results

Key publications from NPP phase 1 

  1. Aimar, A., Mostafa, H., Calabrese, E., Rios-Navarro, A., Tapiador-Morales, R., Lungu, I., et al. (2018). NullHop: A Flexible Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on Sparse Representations of Feature Maps. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 1–13. doi:10.1109/TNNLS.2018.2852335.
  2. Gao, C., Neil, D., Ceolini, E., Liu, S.-C., and Delbruck, T. (2018). DeltaRNN: A Power-efficient Recurrent Neural Network Accelerator. in Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays FPGA ’18. (New York, NY, USA: ACM), 21–30. doi:10.1145/3174243.3174261
  3. J. Binas, D. Neil, S.-C. Liu, and T. Delbruck, “DDD17: End-To-End DAVIS Driving Dataset,” in ICML’17 Workshop on Machine Learning for Autonomous Vehicles (MLAV 2017), Sydney, Australia, 2017 [Online]. Available: https://openreview.net/forum?id=HkehpKVG-&noteId=HkehpKVG-
  4. D. Neil, J. H. Lee, T. Delbruck, and S.-C. Liu, “Delta Networks for Optimized Recurrent Network Computation,” in PMLR, 2017, pp. 2584–2593 [Online]. Available: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/neil17a.html. [Accessed: 14-Sep-2017]
  5. A. Aimar, H. Mostafa, E. Calabrese, A. Rios-Navarro, R. Tapiador-Morales, I.-A. Lungu, M. B. Milde, F. Corradi, A. Linares-Barranco, S.-C. Liu, and T. Delbruck, “NullHop: A Flexible Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on Sparse Representations of Feature Maps,” arXiv:1706.01406 [cs], Jun. 2017 [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.01406. [Accessed: 03-Sep-2017]
  6. D. Neil, J. H. Lee, T. Delbruck, and S.-C. Liu, “Delta Networks for Optimized Recurrent Network Computation,” in accpted to ICML, 2017 [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.01406. [Accessed: 19-Dec-2016]
  7. D. P. Moeys and et al., “A Sensitive Dynamic and Active Pixel Vision Sensor for Color or Neural Imaging Applications,” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, submitted 2017.
  8. I.-A. Lungu, F. Corradi, and T. Delbruck, “Live Demonstration: Convolutional Neural Network Driven by Dynamic Vision Sensor Playing RoShamBo,” in 2017 IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS 2017), Baltimore, MD, USA, 2017 [Online]. Available: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzvXOhBHjRheYjNWZGYtNFpVRkU/view?usp=sharing
  9. C. Gao, D. Neil, E. Ceolini, and S.-C. Liu, “DeltaRNN: A Power-efficient RNN Accelerator,” under review, 2017.
  10. D. Neil, J. H. Lee, T. Delbruck, and S.-C. Liu, “Delta Networks for Optimized Recurrent Network Computation,” arXiv:1612.05571 [cs], Dec. 2016 [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1612.05571. [Accessed: 19-Dec-2016]
  11. B. Rueckauer, I.-A. Lungu, Y. Hu, and M. Pfeiffer, “Theory and Tools for the Conversion of Analog to Spiking Convolutional Neural Networks,” arXiv:1612.04052 [cs, stat], Dec. 2016 [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04052. [Accessed: 16-May-2017]
  12. J. H. Lee, T. Delbruck, and M. Pfeiffer, “Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks using Backpropagation,” arXiv:1608.08782 [cs], Aug. 2016 [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08782. [Accessed: 03-Sep-2017]
  13. J. Ott, Z. Lin, Y. Zhang, S.-C. Liu, and Y. Bengio, “Recurrent Neural Networks With Limited Numerical Precision,” arXiv:1608.06902 [cs], Aug. 2016 [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06902. [Accessed: 25-Aug-2016]
  14. J. Binas, D. Neil, G. Indiveri, S.-C. Liu, and M. Pfeiffer, “Precise deep neural network computation on imprecise low-power analog hardware,” arXiv:1606.07786 [cs], Jun. 2016 [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07786. [Accessed: 23-Aug-2016]
  15. S. Braun, D. Neil, and S.-C. Liu, “A Curriculum Learning Method for Improved Noise Robustness in Automatic Speech Recognition,” arXiv:1606.06864 [cs], Jun. 2016 [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06864. [Accessed: 16-May-2017]
  16. D. P. Moeys, F. Corradi, E. Kerr, P. Vance, G. Das, D. Neil, D. Kerr, and T. Delbrück, “Steering a predator robot using a mixed frame/event-driven convolutional neural network,” in 2016 Second International Conference on Event-based Control, Communication, and Signal Processing (EBCCSP), 2016, pp. 1–8.
  17. D. Neil and S. C. Liu, “Effective sensor fusion with event-based sensors and deep network architectures,” in 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2016, pp. 2282–2285.
  18. D. Neil, M. Pfeiffer, and S.-C. Liu, “Learning to Be Efficient: Algorithms for Training Low-latency, Low-compute Deep Spiking Neural Networks,” in Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, New York, NY, USA, 2016, pp. 293–298 [Online]. Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2851613.2851724. [Accessed: 23-Aug-2016]
  19. T. Delbruck, “Neuromorophic Vision Sensing and Processing (Invited paper),” in 2016 European Solid-State Device Research Conf. & European Solid-State Circuits Conf. Proceedings, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2016.
  20. A. Aimar, E. Calabrese, H. Mostafa, A. Rios-Navarro, R. Tapiador, I.-A. Lungu, A. Jimenez-Fernandez, F. Corradi, S.-C. Liu, A. Linares-Barranco, and T. Delbruck, “Nullhop: Flexibly efficient FPGA CNN accelerator driven by DAVIS neuromorphic vision sensor,” in NIPS 2016, Barcelona, 2016 [Online]. Available: https://nips.cc/Conferences/2016/Schedule?showEvent=6317
  21. E. Stromatias, D. Neil, M. Pfeiffer, F. Galluppi, S. B. Furber, and S.-C. Liu, “Robustness of spiking Deep Belief Networks to noise and reduced bit precision of neuro-inspired hardware platforms,” Front Neurosci, vol. 9, Jul. 2015 [Online]. Available: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4496577/. [Accessed: 23-Aug-2016]