Hybrid CMOS/memristor crossbar structure for implementing hopfield neural network

Abstract

Competent hardware implementation of artificial neural networks is still an important contest. In recent literature, memristor has been introduced as a promising candidate for synapses implementation. However, integrating a memristive circuit with neuron hardware is auspicious research with challenging issues. In this paper, a scalable circuit-level hybrid CMOS/memristor hardware is introduced for implementing a Hopfield neural network. The proposed circuit is fully compatible with the crossbar structure. The performance of the proposed hardware is evaluated for different scales and compared with its software-based counterpart. Moreover, the accuracy of large-scale hardware for Hopfield neural network with 45 neurons and 4320 memristors is evaluated. It is demonstrated that the performance of the circuit is in the line of the software simulation. In comparison with similar works, the proposed circuit consumes 2000 times less energy and retrieves patterns 130 times faster. The implemented circuit is a step toward a general and feasible memristive hardware implementation for recurrent neural networks.