Memristor-based Approximated Computation Boxun Li1, Yi Shan1, Miao Hu2, Yu Wang1, Yiran Chen2, Huazhong Yang1 1Dept. of E.E., TNList, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 2Dept. of E.C.E., University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA 1 Email:
[email protected] Abstract—The cessation of Moore’s Law has limited further architectures, which not only provide a promising hardware improvements in power efficiency. In recent years, the physical solution to neuromorphic system but also help drastically close realization of the memristor has demonstrated a promising the gap of power efficiency between computing systems and solution to ultra-integrated hardware realization of neural net- works, which can be leveraged for better performance and the brain. The memristor is one of those promising devices. power efficiency gains. In this work, we introduce a power The memristor is able to support a large number of signal efficient framework for approximated computations by taking connections within a small footprint by taking the advantage advantage of the memristor-based multilayer neural networks. of the ultra-integration density [7]. And most importantly, A programmable memristor approximated computation unit the nonvolatile feature that the state of the memristor could (Memristor ACU) is introduced first to accelerate approximated computation and a memristor-based approximated computation be tuned by the current passing through itself makes the framework with scalability is proposed on top of the Memristor memristor a potential, perhaps even the best, device to realize ACU. We also introduce a parameter configuration algorithm of neuromorphic computing systems with picojoule level energy the Memristor ACU and a feedback state tuning circuit to pro- consumption [8], [9].