Design and Hardware Implementation of Neuromorphic Systems With RRAM Synapses and Threshold-Controlled Neurons for Pattern Recognition

In this paper, a hardware-realized neuromorphic system for pattern recognition is presented. The system directly captures images from the environment, and then conducts classification using a single layer neural network. Metal-oxide resistive random access memory (RRAM) is used as electronic synapses, and threshold-controlled neurons are proposed as postsynaptic neurons to save the system area and simplify the operation. In the proposed threshold-controlled neuron, no capacitor is utilized, which contributes to higher integration density. The total energy consumption of RRAM synapses for classifying an example is 0.31μJ on average. The proposed system has been implemented on hardware, and has been experimentally demonstrated to show the capability of pattern recognition.