Implementation of unsupervised clustering based on population coding of magnetic tunnel junctions

Abstract

Developing suitable algorithms that utilize the natural advantages of the corresponding devices is a key issue in the hardware research of brain-inspired computing. Population coding is one of the computational schemes in biological neural systems and it contains the mechanisms for noise reduction, short-term memory and implementation of complex nonlinear functions. Here we show the controllable stochastic dynamical behaviors for the technically mature spintronic device, magnetic tunnel junctions, which can be used as the basis of population coding. As an example, we construct a two-layer spiking neural network, in which groups of magnetic tunnel junctions are used to code input data. After unsupervised learning, this spiking neural network successfully classifies the iris data set. Numerical simulation demonstrates that the population coding is robust enough against the nonuniform dispersion in devices, which is inevitable in fabrication and integration of hardware devices.