Implementation of a binary neural network on a passive array of magnetic tunnel junctions
Physical Review Applied, 2022•APS
The increasing scale of neural networks and their growing application space have produced
demand for more energy-and memory-efficient artificial-intelligence-specific hardware.
Avenues to mitigate the main issue, the von Neumann bottleneck, include in-memory and
near-memory architectures, as well as algorithmic approaches. Here we leverage the low-
power and the inherently binary operation of magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) to
demonstrate neural network hardware inference based on passive arrays of MTJs. In …
demand for more energy-and memory-efficient artificial-intelligence-specific hardware.
Avenues to mitigate the main issue, the von Neumann bottleneck, include in-memory and
near-memory architectures, as well as algorithmic approaches. Here we leverage the low-
power and the inherently binary operation of magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) to
demonstrate neural network hardware inference based on passive arrays of MTJs. In …
The increasing scale of neural networks and their growing application space have produced demand for more energy- and memory-efficient artificial-intelligence-specific hardware. Avenues to mitigate the main issue, the von Neumann bottleneck, include in-memory and near-memory architectures, as well as algorithmic approaches. Here we leverage the low-power and the inherently binary operation of magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) to demonstrate neural network hardware inference based on passive arrays of MTJs. In general, transferring a trained network model to hardware for inference is confronted by degradation in performance due to device-to-device variations, write errors, parasitic resistance, and nonidealities in the substrate. To quantify the effect of these hardware realities, we benchmark 300 unique weight matrix solutions of a two-layer perceptron to classify the Wine dataset for both classification accuracy and write fidelity. Despite device imperfections, we achieve software-equivalent accuracy of up to 95.3% with proper tuning of network parameters in 15 × 15 MTJ arrays having a range of device sizes. The success of this tuning process shows that new metrics are needed to characterize the performance and quality of networks reproduced in mixed signal hardware.
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