Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are energy-efficient artificial neural network models that can carry out data-intensive applications. Energy consumption, latency, and memory bottleneck are some of the major issues that arise in machine learning applications due to their data-demanding nature. Memristor-enabled Computing-In-Memory (CIM) architectures have been able to tackle the memory wall issue, eliminating the energy and time-consuming movement of data. In this work we develop a scalable CIM-based SNN architecture with our fabricated two-layer memristor crossbar array. In addition to having an enhanced heat dissipation capability, our memristor exhibits substantial enhancement of 10% to 66% in design area, power and latency compared to state-of-the-art memristors. This design incorporates an inter-spike interval (ISI) encoding scheme due to its high information density to convert the incoming input signals into spikes. Furthermore, we include a time-to-first-spike (TTFS) based output processing stage for its energy-efficiency to carry out the final classification. With the combination of ISI, CIM and TTFS, this network has a competitive inference speed of 2μs/image and can successfully classify handwritten digits with 2.9mW of power and 2.51pJ energy per spike. The proposed architecture with the ISI encoding scheme can achieve ∼10% higher accuracy than those of other encoding schemes in the MNIST dataset. 
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                            A Concentration-Time Hybrid Modulation Scheme for Molecular Communications
                        
                    
    
            Significant inter-symbol interference (ISI) challenges the achievement of reliable, high data-rate molecular communication via diffusion. In this paper, a hybrid modulation based on pulse position and concentration is proposed to mitigate ISI. By exploiting the time dimension, molecular concentration and position modulation (MCPM) increases the achievable data rate over conventional concentration and position-based modulations. In addition, unlike multi-molecule schemes, this hybrid scheme employs a single-molecule type and so simplifies transceiver implementations. In the paper, the optimal sequence detector of the proposed modulation is provided as well as a reduced complexity detector (two-stage, position-concentration detector, TPCD). A tractable cost function based on the TPCD detector is proposed and employed to optimize the design of the hybrid modulation scheme. In addition, the approximate probability of error for the MCPM-TPCD system is derived and is shown to be tight with respect to simulated performance. Numerically, MCPM shows improved performance over standard concentration and pulse position-based schemes in the low transmission power and high bit-rate regime. Furthermore, MCPM offers increased robustness against synchronization errors. 
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                            - Award ID(s):
- 1817200
- PAR ID:
- 10296480
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multi-Scale Communications
- ISSN:
- 2332-7804
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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