Is my Neural Network Neuromorphic? Taxonomy, Recent Trends and Future Directions in Neuromorphic Engineering
This work clarifies taxonomy and benchmarks for neuromorphic engineering, aiding researchers and engineers in standardizing and advancing the field, though it is incremental as a review and analysis.
The paper reviews recent neuromorphic engineering systems to identify common features, finding that analog computing, non-von Neumann architectures, and spiking neural networks are key, with analog and low-precision designs showing high efficiency in throughput, energy, and area, though digital alternatives also perform well.
In this paper, we review recent work published over the last 3 years under the umbrella of Neuromorphic engineering to analyze what are the common features among such systems. We see that there is no clear consensus but each system has one or more of the following features:(1) Analog computing (2) Non vonNeumann Architecture and low-precision digital processing (3) Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) with components closely related to biology. We compare recent machine learning accelerator chips to show that indeed analog processing and reduced bit precision architectures have best throughput, energy and area efficiencies. However, pure digital architectures can also achieve quite high efficiencies by just adopting a non von-Neumann architecture. Given the design automation tools for digital hardware design, it raises a question on the likelihood of adoption of analog processing in the near future for industrial designs. Next, we argue about the importance of defining standards and choosing proper benchmarks for the progress of neuromorphic system designs and propose some desired characteristics of such benchmarks. Finally, we show brain-machine interfaces as a potential task that fulfils all the criteria of such benchmarks.