No Arabic abstract
Silicon-photonic neural networks (SPNNs) offer substantial improvements in computing speed and energy efficiency compared to their digital electronic counterparts. However, the energy efficiency and accuracy of SPNNs are highly impacted by uncertainties that arise from fabrication-process and thermal variations. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive and hierarchical study on the impact of random uncertainties on the classification accuracy of a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI)-based SPNN. We show that such impact can vary based on both the location and characteristics (e.g., tuned phase angles) of a non-ideal silicon-photonic device. Simulation results show that in an SPNN with two hidden layers and 1374 tunable-thermal-phase shifters, random uncertainties even in mature fabrication processes can lead to a catastrophic 70% accuracy loss.
We propose an optimization method to improve power efficiency and robustness in silicon-photonic-based coherent integrated photonic neural networks. Our method reduces the network power consumption by 15.3% and the accuracy loss under uncertainties by 16.1%.
Neural networks have enabled applications in artificial intelligence through machine learning, and neuromorphic computing. Software implementations of neural networks on conventional computers that have separate memory and processor (and that operate sequentially) are limited in speed and energy efficiency. Neuromorphic engineering aims to build processors in which hardware mimics neurons and synapses in the brain for distributed and parallel processing. Neuromorphic engineering enabled by photonics (optical physics) can offer sub-nanosecond latencies and high bandwidth with low energies to extend the domain of artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing applications to machine learning acceleration, nonlinear programming, intelligent signal processing, etc. Photonic neural networks have been demonstrated on integrated platforms and free-space optics depending on the class of applications being targeted. Here, we discuss the prospects and demonstrated applications of these photonic neural networks.
Due to challenging efficiency limits facing conventional and unconventional electronic architectures, information processors based on photonics have attracted renewed interest. Research communities have yet to settle on definitive techniques to describe the performance of this class of information processors. Photonic systems are different from electronic ones, so the existing concepts of computer performance measurement cannot necessarily apply. In this manuscript, we attempt to quantify the power use of photonic neural networks with state-of-the-art and future hardware. We derive scaling laws, physical limits, and new platform performance metrics. We find that overall performance is regime-like, which means that energy efficiency characteristics of a photonic processor can be completely described by no less than seven performance numbers. The introduction of these analytical strategies provides a much needed foundation for quantitative roadmapping and commercial value assignment for silicon photonic neural networks.
Neuromorphic hardware platforms implement biological neurons and synapses to execute spiking neural networks (SNNs) in an energy-efficient manner. We present SpiNeMap, a design methodology to map SNNs to crossbar-based neuromorphic hardware, minimizing spike latency and energy consumption. SpiNeMap operates in two steps: SpiNeCluster and SpiNePlacer. SpiNeCluster is a heuristic-based clustering technique to partition SNNs into clusters of synapses, where intracluster local synapses are mapped within crossbars of the hardware and inter-cluster global synapses are mapped to the shared interconnect. SpiNeCluster minimizes the number of spikes on global synapses, which reduces spike congestion on the shared interconnect, improving application performance. SpiNePlacer then finds the best placement of local and global synapses on the hardware using a meta-heuristic-based approach to minimize energy consumption and spike latency. We evaluate SpiNeMap using synthetic and realistic SNNs on the DynapSE neuromorphic hardware. We show that SpiNeMap reduces average energy consumption by 45% and average spike latency by 21%, compared to state-of-the-art techniques.
Traditional neural networks require enormous amounts of data to build their complex mappings during a slow training procedure that hinders their abilities for relearning and adapting to new data. Memory-augmented neural networks enhance neural networks with an explicit memory to overcome these issues. Access to this explicit memory, however, occurs via soft read and write operations involving every individual memory entry, resulting in a bottleneck when implemented using the conventional von Neumann computer architecture. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a robust architecture that employs a computational memory unit as the explicit memory performing analog in-memory computation on high-dimensional (HD) vectors, while closely matching 32-bit software-equivalent accuracy. This is achieved by a content-based attention mechanism that represents unrelated items in the computational memory with uncorrelated HD vectors, whose real-valued components can be readily approximated by binary, or bipolar components. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on few-shot image classification tasks on the Omniglot dataset using more than 256,000 phase-change memory devices. Our approach effectively merges the richness of deep neural network representations with HD computing that paves the way for robust vector-symbolic manipulations applicable in reasoning, fusion, and compression.