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Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are brain- inspired computing models incorporating unique temporal dynamics and event-driven processing. Rich dynamics in both space and time offer great challenges and opportunities for efficient processing of sparse spatiotemporal data compared with conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). Specifically, the additional overheads for handling the added temporal dimension limit the computational capabilities of neuromorphic accelerators. Iterative processing at every time-point with sparse inputs in a temporally sequential manner not only degrades the utilization of the systolic array but also intensifies data movement.In this work, we propose a novel technique and architecture that significantly improve utilization and data movement while efficiently handling temporal sparsity of SNNs on systolic arrays. Unlike time-sequential processing in conventional SNN accelerators, we pack multiple time points into a single time window (TW) and process the computations induced by active synaptic inputs falling under several TWs in parallel, leading to the proposed parallel time batching. It allows weight reuse across multiple time points and enhances the utilization of the systolic array with reduced idling of processing elements, overcoming the irregularity of sparse firing activities. We optimize the granularity of time-domain processing, i.e., the TW size, which significantly impacts the data reuse and utilization. We further boost the utilization efficiency by simultaneously scheduling non-overlapping sparse spiking activities onto the array. The proposed architectures offer a unifying solution for general spiking neural networks with commonly exhibited temporal sparsity, a key challenge in hardware acceleration, delivering 248X energy-delay product (EDP) improvement on average compared to an SNN baseline for accelerating various networks. Compared to ANN based accelerators, our approach improves EDP by 47X on the CIFAR10 dataset. 

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have emerged as a new generation of neural networks, presenting a brain-inspired event-driven model with advantages in spatiotemporal information processing. Due to the need for high power consumption of compute-intensive neural accelerators, adequate power delivery network (PDN) design is a key requirement to ensure power efficiency and integrity. However, PDN design for SNN accelerators has not been extensively studied despite its great potential benefit in energy efficiency. In this paper, we present the first study on dynamic heterogeneous voltage regulation (HVR) for spiking neural accelerators to maximize system energy efficiency while ensuring power integrity. We propose a novel sparse-workload-aware dynamic PDN control policy, which enables high energy efficiency of sparse spiking computation on a systolic array. By exploring sparse inputs and all-or-none nature of spiking computations for PDN control, we explore different types of PDNs to accelerate spiking convolutional neural networks (S-CNNs) trained with the dynamic vision sensor (DVS) gesture dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate various power gating schemes to further optimize the proposed PDN architecture, which leads to a more than a three-fold reduction in total energy overhead for spiking neural computations on systolic array-based accelerators. 

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising biologically-plausible computing model and lend themselves to ultra-low-power event-driven processing on neuromorphic processors. Compared with the conventional artificial neural networks, SNNs are well-suited for processing complex spatiotemporal data. Despite its significance, dataflow optimization of spiking neural accelerator architectures has not been extensively studied. Recognizing the need for efficient processing of complex spatiotemporal data while considering the all-or-none nature of spiking activities, we propose holistic reconfigurable dataflow optimization for systolic array acceleration of spiking convolutional networks (S-CNNs). A novel scheme is introduced for parallel acceleration of computation across multiple time points, which further allows for systemic optimization of variable tiling for a large performance and efficiency gains. We show how variable tiling, in particular, the positioning of the temporal dimension, can be targeted to optimize data movement, throughput, and energy efficiency. Furthermore, we explore joint layer-dependent dataflow and accelerator hardware optimization to further boost performance and energy efficiency. To support systemic design space exploration, we develop an SNN dataflow simulator capable of analyzing the throughput and energy dissipation of systolic array accelerators for any targeted S-CNN while considering the inherent spatiotemporal characteristics of spiking neural computation. The proposed techniques deliver orders of magnitude of improvements on throughput, energy efficiency, and delay-energy product for accelerating deep Alexnet and VGG-16 SNNs.