Lisa Loomis

Peng Zhou, Nathan R. McDonald, Alexander J. Edwards et al.

Reservoir computing is an emerging methodology for neuromorphic computing that is especially well-suited for hardware implementations in size, weight, and power (SWaP) constrained environments. This work proposes a novel hardware implementation of a reservoir computer using a planar nanomagnet array. A small nanomagnet reservoir is demonstrated via micromagnetic simulations to be able to identify simple waveforms with 100% accuracy. Planar nanomagnet reservoirs are a promising new solution to the growing need for dedicated neuromorphic hardware.

Lisa Loomis, Nathan McDonald, Cory Merkel

This paper presents and demonstrates a stochastic logic time delay reservoir design in FPGA hardware. The reservoir network approach is analyzed using a number of metrics, such as kernel quality, generalization rank, performance on simple benchmarks, and is also compared to a deterministic design. A novel re-seeding method is introduced to reduce the adverse effects of stochastic noise, which may also be implemented in other stochastic logic reservoir computing designs, such as echo state networks. Benchmark results indicate that the proposed design performs well on noise-tolerant classification problems, but more work needs to be done to improve the stochastic logic time delay reservoirs robustness for regression problems. In addition, we show that the stochastic design can significantly reduce area cost if the conversion between binary and stochastic representations implemented efficiently.