Ankur Singh

Ankur Singh

The thesis investigates the utilization of memristive and memcapacitive crossbar arrays in low-power machine learning accelerators, offering a comprehensive co-design framework for deep neural networks (DNN). The model, implemented through a hybrid Python and PyTorch approach, accounts for various non-idealities, achieving exceptional training accuracies of 90.02% and 91.03% for the CIFAR-10 dataset with memristive and memcapacitive crossbar arrays on an 8-layer VGG network. Additionally, the thesis introduces a novel approach to emulate meminductor devices using Operational Transconductance Amplifiers (OTA) and capacitors, showcasing adjustable behavior. Transistor-level simulations in 180 nm CMOS technology, operating at 60 MHz, demonstrate the proposed meminductor emulator's viability with a power consumption of 0.337 mW. The design is further validated in neuromorphic circuits and CNN accelerators, achieving training and testing accuracies of 91.04% and 88.82%, respectively. Notably, the exclusive use of MOS transistors ensures the feasibility of monolithic IC fabrication. This research significantly contributes to the exploration of advanced hardware solutions for efficient and high-performance machine-learning applications.

Ankur Singh, Dowon Kim, Byung-Geun Lee

Data-intensive computing tasks, such as training neural networks, are crucial for artificial intelligence applications but often come with high energy demands. One promising solution is to develop specialized hardware that directly maps neural networks, utilizing arrays of memristive devices to perform parallel multiply-accumulate operations. In our research, we introduce a novel CMOS-based memcapacitor circuit that is validated using the cadence tool. Additionally, we developed the device in Python to facilitate the design of a memcapacitive-based accelerator. Our proposed framework employs a crossbar array of memcapacitor devices to train a neural network capable of digit classification and CIFAR dataset recognition. We tested the non-ideal characteristics of the constructed memcapacitor-based neural network. The system achieved an impressive 98.4% training accuracy in digit recognition and 94.4% training accuracy in CIFAR recognition, highlighting its effectiveness. This study demonstrates the potential of memcapacitor-based neural network systems in handling classification tasks and sets the stage for further advancements in neuromorphic computing.