Spiking Neural Encoding and Hardware Implementations for Neuromorphic Computing

Due to the high requirements of the computational power of modern data-intensive applications, the traditional von Neumann structure and neuromorphic computing structure started to play complementary roles in the area of computing. Thus, neuromorphic computing architectures have attracted much attention with high data capacity and power efficiency. In this chapter, the basic concept of neuromorphic computing is discussed, including spiking codes and neurons. The spiking encoder can transfer analog signals to spike signals, thus avoiding using power-consuming analog-to-digital converters. Comparisons of training accuracy and robustness of neural codes are carried out, and the circuit implementations of the spiking temporal encoders are briefly introduced. The encoding schemes are evaluated on the PyTorch platform with the most common datasets, such as Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST), Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, 10 classes (CIFAR-10), and The Street View House Numbers (SVHN). From the result, the multiplexing temporal code has shown high data capacity, robustness, and low training error. It achieves at least 6.4% more accuracy than other state-of-the-art works using other encoding schemes.