A Hybrid-Mode On-Chip Router for the Large-Scale FPGA-Based Neuromorphic Platform

Abstract

Large-scale neuromorphic computing requires the multi-chip network to provide high computing power. Efficient routing schemes and on-chip router design are necessary for handling various inter-chip transmission patterns. In this paper, we propose a hybrid-mode on-chip router that supports both multicast and unicast routing for the large-scale neuromorphic simulation. Two routing schemes, namely Cache-like Spike Weight Indexing and General Unicast Flow Control, are proposed to accommodate the chip-to-chip transmission of spike and non-spike data. This work is evaluated on a neuromorphic platform built with an <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$8\times 8$ </tex-math></inline-formula> FPGA chips array. Running a simulation of 1M neurons at 200MHz, the proposed router achieves a processing latency of 25ns and a chip-to-chip latency of 287ns. Working in the unicast mode, the router can synchronize status flags of all chips within <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5 ~\mu \text{s}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Moreover, it reduces the peak spike traffic by 25.65&#x0025; with the help of Load-aware Multicast Routing, compared with other multicast routing strategies.