A neural network testing system based on electronic synapse array
By designing a neural network test system based on electronic synapse arrays and utilizing the programmable features of the FPGA part of the SoC development board, high-precision testing of electronic synapse arrays is achieved, which solves the problem of the lack of hardware-level neural network test systems in the existing technology and improves the flexibility and accuracy of the test.
Patent Information
- Application Number
- CN202411632998.7
- Authority / Receiving Office
- CN · China
- Patent Type
- Patents(China)
- Current Assignee / Owner
- Filing Date
- 2024-11-15
- Publication Date
- 2025-09-16
- Estimated Expiration
- 2044-11-15
AI Technical Summary
Existing research on electronic synaptic devices mainly focuses on the performance of unit devices, while research on neural networks constructed by them is mainly based on simulation, lacking hardware-level implementation and testing systems.
A neural network test system based on an electronic synapse array was designed. By utilizing the programmable characteristics of the FPGA part of the SoC development board, positive or negative pulses were applied to selected devices of the electronic synapse array through the array test circuit board, achieving high-precision voltage writing and current reading operations.
It improves the flexibility and accuracy of testing electronic synapse arrays, can accurately read and erase the resistance values of electronic synapses in specified rows and columns in the array, supports testing of different neural network structures, and promotes performance testing of neural network computing systems.
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Figure CN119512040B_ABST
Abstract
Description
Technical Field
[0001] The present invention relates to the technical field of semiconductors and integrated circuits, and in particular to a neural network testing system based on an electronic synapse array. Background Art
[0002] With the rapid development of emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things, the demand for real-time, data-centric, intelligent computing continues to grow, but traditional von Neumann computing systems are increasingly unable to meet the explosive growth in computing power. This is because under the von Neumann architecture, the data processing unit and storage unit are separated. The delay and energy consumption caused by the round-trip transmission of data lead to problems such as slow speed and high power consumption. These problems are even more prominent when processing complex information. In contrast, the human brain, a neural network system with a parallel structure composed of neurons and synapses, can process large amounts of complex information with extremely low power consumption (approximately 20W). Therefore, imitating the human brain, researchers have begun research on integrated computing that integrates computing units and storage units. They have proposed a variety of artificial electronic synaptic devices and explored neural network in-memory computing systems based on these devices, showing potential for application in terms of fast speed and low power consumption. Among them, emerging memristive electronic synaptic devices, including ferroelectric tunnel junctions, ferroelectric field-effect transistors, and resistive random access memories based on oxygen vacancies or metal ion migration, have demonstrated more significant advantages in terms of energy consumption and integration than electronic synapses constructed using traditional CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) devices.
[0003] However, research on emerging electronic synaptic memristor devices still focuses primarily on the performance of unit devices, while research on neural networks constructed from them is primarily based on simulation. The preparation of crossbar arrays composed of multiple synaptic devices and the implementation of neural network computing at the hardware level have gradually attracted attention. Related research and development urgently requires the construction of a test system for electronic synaptic arrays and their neural network computing, so as to accurately read and write the resistance values of electronic synapses in specified rows and columns of the array. In combination with a connected system-on-chip (SoC) containing ARM (Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) Machines) modules and FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) modules, different neural network structures can be constructed to test the performance of neural network computing systems constructed using synaptic arrays, which is of great significance to research and development in related fields. Summary of the Invention
[0004] The purpose of the present invention is to provide a neural network testing system based on an electronic synapse array. The system fully utilizes the programmable characteristics of the FPGA part of the SoC development board, can apply positive or negative pulses to selected devices in the electronic synapse array through the array test circuit board, has high reading and writing accuracy, and improves the flexibility of testing the electronic synapse array.
[0005] The purpose of the present invention is achieved through the following technical solutions:
[0006] A neural network testing system based on an electronic synapse array, the system comprising a control system, an array testing circuit board, and an electronic synapse array, wherein:
[0007] The control system is specifically a SoC development board including an ARM module and an FPGA module, which can reconfigurably write array test and in-memory calculation programs and exchange data with a computer and an array test circuit board;
[0008] The control system is connected to the array test circuit board and communicates with the inter-integrated circuit IIC protocol through the FPGA middle layer board interface;
[0009] The array test circuit board comprises an analog-to-digital / digital-to-analog conversion module and a multiplexer MUX module, which are connected to the electronic synapse array via pin headers;
[0010] The array test circuit board receives instructions from the control system and is used to select specific cells or rows and columns in the electronic synapse array, perform high-precision voltage writing and current reading operations on the selected cells; or provide multiple different voltage inputs to different rows of a column at the same time, and output multiple current results at the same time;
[0011] The array test circuit board uses word lines WL and bit lines BL to control row and column signals of the electronic synapse array, and can select a designated unit of the electronic synapse array to switch between reading and writing;
[0012] The electronic synapse array is composed of multiple non-volatile, multi-state artificial electronic synapse devices formed into an array structure with m rows and n columns through a crossbar process. The synapse is connected to the word line WL driver and the bit line BL driver of the array test circuit board through pin headers. The synapse receives input signals from the array test circuit board, and the readout signal reflects the storage state of the corresponding unit synapse device.
[0013] In which, the electronic synapse array is configured as a conductance matrix, the conductance value corresponds to the synaptic weight in the neural network, and the input voltage and output current correspond to the input and output in the neural network respectively; thereby mapping the multiplication and addition convolution operations of the convolution layer and the fully connected layer in the neural network to the operation of inputting different voltages and reading parallel currents of the electronic synapse array.
[0014] It can be seen from the technical solution provided by the present invention that the above system fully utilizes the programmable characteristics of the FPGA part of the SoC development board, and can apply positive or negative pulses to selected devices in the electronic synapse array through the array test circuit board, with high reading and writing accuracy, thereby improving the flexibility of testing the electronic synapse array. BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS
[0015] In order to more clearly illustrate the technical solutions of the embodiments of the present invention, the following briefly introduces the drawings required for use in the description of the embodiments. Obviously, the drawings described below are only some embodiments of the present invention. For ordinary technicians in this field, other drawings can be obtained based on these drawings without paying any creative work.
[0016] Figure 1 A schematic diagram of a neural network testing system based on an electronic synapse array according to an embodiment of the present invention;
[0017] Figure 2 Schematic diagram of the principle of biological neural synapses according to an embodiment of the present invention;
[0018] Figure 3 An architectural diagram of an electronic synapse array control system provided by an embodiment of the present invention;
[0019] Figure 4 This is a circuit diagram of the array test circuit board according to an embodiment of the present invention;
[0020] Figure 5 This is a schematic diagram of the result of the electronic synapse array implementing the vector inner product described in Example 1 of the present invention;
[0021] Figure 6 Schematic diagram of error distribution of the vector inner product achieved by the electronic synapse array described in Example 1 of the present invention;
[0022] Figure 7 This is a schematic diagram of the result of image convolution operation performed by the electronic synapse array described in Example 2 of the present invention;
[0023] Figure 8 This is a schematic diagram of the small convolutional neural network structure provided in Example 3 of the present invention;
[0024] Figure 9 Schematic diagram of the results of implementing small convolutional neural network inference using the electronic synapse array provided in Example 3 of the present invention. DETAILED DESCRIPTION
[0025] The following is a clear and complete description of the technical solutions in the embodiments of the present invention in conjunction with the accompanying drawings. Obviously, the described embodiments are only some embodiments of the present invention, not all embodiments, and do not constitute a limitation of the present invention. All other embodiments obtained by ordinary technicians in this field based on the embodiments of the present invention without making any creative efforts shall fall within the scope of protection of the present invention.
[0026] like Figure 1 FIG2 is a flow chart of a neural network testing system based on an electronic synapse array according to an embodiment of the present invention. The system includes a control system, an array test circuit board, and an electronic synapse array, wherein:
[0027] The control system is specifically a SoC development board including an ARM module and an FPGA module, which can be reconfigured to write array test and calculation programs and exchange data with a computer (Personal Computer, PC) and an array test circuit board;
[0028] The control system is connected to the array test circuit board through an FPGA mezzanine card (FMC) interface and communicates using an inter-integrated circuit (IIC) protocol;
[0029] The array test circuit board includes an analog-to-digital / digital-to-analog converter (ADC / DAC) module and a multiplexer (MUX) module, which are connected to the electronic synapse array via pin headers;
[0030] The array test circuit board receives instructions from the control system and is used to select specific cells or rows and columns in the electronic synapse array, performing high-precision voltage writing and current reading operations on the selected cells; or providing multiple different voltage inputs to different rows of a column and simultaneously outputting multiple current results; the pulse width and amplitude of the input voltage are set according to device characteristics and can be set to positive or negative voltage; wherein, the array test circuit board uses word lines (WL) and bit lines (BL) to control the row and column signals of the electronic synapse array, and can select a specified cell of the electronic synapse array and switch between reading and writing;
[0031] The electronic synapse array is composed of multiple non-volatile, multi-state artificial electronic synapse devices formed into an array structure with m rows and n columns through a crossbar process. The synapse is connected to the WL driver and BL driver of the array test circuit board through pin headers. The synapse receives input signals from the array test circuit board, and the readout signal reflects the storage state of the corresponding unit synapse device.
[0032] The electronic synapse array is configured as a conductance matrix, the conductance value corresponds to the synaptic weight in the neural network, and the input voltage and output current correspond to the input and output in the neural network respectively; thereby mapping the multiplication and addition convolution operations of the convolutional layer (Convolutional Layer) and the fully-connected layer (Fully-Connected Layer) in the neural network to the operation of inputting different voltages and reading parallel currents of the electronic synapse array.
[0033] like Figure 2 The figure shows a schematic diagram of the principle of the biological neural synapse described in an embodiment of the present invention. The postsynaptic neuron is stimulated by several presynaptic neurons and integrates these signals until a certain threshold is reached to produce a response. The weight of the biological synapse connecting the presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons can be adjusted to affect the transmission of the above-mentioned stimulation signals and realize functions such as learning and recognition. Researchers imitated the structure of biological neural synapses to construct artificial electronic synaptic devices to achieve efficient and low-power in-memory computing. The device has the characteristics of non-volatility, polymorphism, programmability, and low energy consumption. In specific implementations, the artificial electronic synaptic device can include a ferroelectric tunnel junction, a ferroelectric field-effect transistor, a resistive random access memory based on oxygen vacancies or metal ion migration, a phase change memory, or a magnetic tunnel junction.
[0034] like Figure 3 The figure shows the architecture of the electronic synapse array control system provided by an embodiment of the present invention. The control system consists of a SoC development board and a PC. The ARM module of the SoC development board acts as a multi-interface processing system (PS), communicating with the computer using the Universal Asynchronous Receiver / Transmitter (UART) protocol. It can burn programs into the SoC development board and communicate with the SoC development board. The array storage information and processing results obtained by the interaction between the SoC development board and the array test circuit board are returned to the computer for researchers to monitor. Researchers can dynamically write different bitstream files on the computer's Vitis platform and burn them into the SoC development board, realizing short-cycle program development and testing.
[0035] The ARM module and FPGA module use the Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) as the bus protocol for communication, where:
[0036] The ARM module communicates with a general-purpose input / output (GPIO), an interrupt control module, a digital-to-analog conversion control module, and an analog-to-digital conversion control module of the array test circuit board via an AXI interconnect.
[0037] The universal input / output module is used to control the MUX module in the array test circuit board. By setting the values of the word line write WL_WR, the bit line write BL_WR, and the bit line read BL_RD, the rows and columns of the array test circuit board are controlled to connect to the active channel, the inactive channel, or the ground.
[0038] The digital-to-analog conversion control module and the analog-to-digital conversion control module are used to control the read and write operations of the electronic synapse array, set the starting and ending values and pulse width of the input voltage of each row of the digital-to-analog conversion module; receive the output value of each column of the analog-to-digital conversion module and return it to the SoC development board and computer.
[0039] like Figure 4 The figure shows the circuit schematic of the array test circuit board according to an embodiment of the present invention. The intersections of multiple artificial synaptic devices form an electronic synaptic array of up to 10×10, which is connected to the corresponding nodes WL and BL of the array test circuit board through pin headers; the conductance value of the electronic synaptic device located in the i-th row and j-th column is marked as G i,j Applying a read voltage pulse to the array test circuit board can obtain the conductance value of the device at a specified position; applying a write voltage pulse can adjust the conductance value, thereby realizing non-volatile storage of the electronic synapse array. In a specific implementation, the digital-to-analog conversion module DAC of the array test circuit board converts the discrete DAC code into an analog voltage input, which passes through a potentiometer (RP) and a row strobe to a specified row of the array. The current flowing through the device passes through a column strobe to the analog-to-digital conversion module ADC, which reads the analog voltage as a discrete ADC code, thereby reflecting the current of the corresponding column, wherein:
[0040] The row selection is a two-way selector. When the selector is set to "0", the row is connected to the active channel of the word line WL; when the selector is set to "1", the row is connected to the inactive channel of the word line WL.
[0041] The column select is a three-way selector. When the selector is set to "0", the column is connected to the inactive channel of the bit line BL; when the selector is set to "1", the column is grounded; when the selector is set to "2", the column is connected to the bit line BL channel with the corresponding serial number;
[0042] The purpose of using active and inactive channel design is to operate the electronic synaptic device by connecting one row to the active channel and applying the write voltage V, grounding one column, and connecting the remaining rows and columns to the inactive channel and applying V / 2 or V / 3, thus reducing the impact of crosstalk in the array circuit.
[0043] The column current is read by transimpedance amplification. Under the premise that the column select is set to "2", the column current is first connected to the operational amplifier (OPA) and then the feedback resistor R F Converted into voltage, it is read by the analog-to-digital conversion module ADC after passing through the low-pass filter (LPF). The current value is determined by the ADC reading value and the feedback resistor R F The ratio is worth getting;
[0044] Therefore, the relationship between the semaphores is:
[0045] I j =Σ i G ij ×V i (1)
[0046] V j (ADC) = R F ×I j (2)
[0047] Among them, I j is the column current of the j-th bit line; G ij is the conductance of the electronic synaptic device at the intersection of row i and column j in the array; V i is the row voltage of the word line in row i; V j (ADC) is the voltage value read by the ADC corresponding to the j-th column bit line; R F is the feedback resistor used in the transimpedance amplifier circuit corresponding to the j-th column bit line.
[0048] In the specific implementation, the clock frequency is set in the ARM module, and three different clock frequencies are generated through the clock multiplication (Clocking Wizard), which are used as the bus frequency, DAC frequency and ADC frequency respectively. Specifically in this embodiment, they are 100MHz, 48MHz and 24MHz.
[0049] The unit device of the electronic synapse array is subjected to conductivity control by inputting a write voltage pulse, and the current conductivity state of the device is measured by inputting a read voltage pulse and reading the output current.
[0050] In addition, the indicators of the array test circuit board include:
[0051] The voltage pulse width provided by the digital-to-analog conversion module DAC is at least 500ns, and the maximum amplitude of each pulse voltage is ±10V; the voltage accuracy is better than 10mV; and the maximum current that each channel can provide is 60mA;
[0052] The accuracy of voltage reading is better than 1mV; the accuracy of current reading is better than 1nA; the upper limit of single-channel reading current is 3.3mA; the feedback resistor R F When taking 1kΩ and 1MΩ, read mA current and μA current respectively.
[0053] It should be noted that the contents not described in detail in the embodiments of the present invention belong to the prior art known to those skilled in the art.
[0054] To verify the capabilities of the synaptic array test, the following specific examples are tested:
[0055] Example 1: This example tests an electronic synapse array constructed using ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs), using it to calculate the inner product of two vectors (each containing nine components). The nine components of one vector represent the conductance values of nine FTJ synapses in a column within the FTJ synapse array, programmed with different set values via a circuit board. The nine components of the other vector are represented by different read voltages applied across nine channels, generating a total of 84 different read voltage vectors for testing.
[0056] Specifically, in the test circuit board of this embodiment, given the transport characteristics of the FTJ (selecting a linear volt-ampere characteristic in the low-voltage region), the amplitude range of the read voltage applied to each row is set between -0.1V and +0.1V. The DAC resolution of this test board is 1.22mV, so the voltage range corresponds to the DAC code range of 8110 (corresponding to a voltage amplitude of -100.04mV) to 8274 (corresponding to a voltage amplitude of 100.04mV). Nine random integers between 8110 and 8274 are generated in the SoC development board and their amplitudes are assigned to the DACs of the nine channels of the array test circuit board, thereby generating read voltage pulses on the corresponding WLs (for example, when the DAC code is 8205, the corresponding voltage amplitude is 15.86mV). The nine read voltages are simultaneously applied to the nine FTJ synapses in one column of the FTJ synapse array. The current on the BL corresponding to the FTJ synapse in this column is read by the corresponding ADC and converted into an ADC code.
[0057] The array test circuit board then returns the ADC code collected on the BL to the SoC development board and the computer, and the measured current value is converted using the aforementioned formula (2). The measured current value and the theoretical current value calculated using Ohm's law and Kirchhoff's law are used as the vertical axis and horizontal axis respectively, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 5 The figure shows the result of the vector inner product achieved by the electronic synapse array described in Example 1 of the present invention. The results of 84 sets of vector inner products are compared and the relative standard error is calculated. Figure 6 Schematic diagram of the error distribution of the vector inner product achieved by the electronic synapse array described in Example 1 of the present invention.
[0058] from Figure 5 、 Figure 6 It can be seen that under the control of this system, the electronic synapse array completed the vector inner product operation with a standard deviation of the relative error of only 2.24%, indicating that the vector inner product operation performed by the electronic synapse array has high accuracy.
[0059] Example 2: Applying the synaptic array to image processing. The specific task is to perform gradient operation on the input grayscale image to extract or sharpen the edge of the image.
[0060] like Figure 7 The figure shows the result of image convolution operation performed by the electronic synapse array described in Example 2 of the present invention. Three image processing operators are selected, of which the first two are 2×2 Roberts operators in the 45° and 135° directions (corresponding to the two diagonals of the image). Figure 7 The three operators are marked as Roberts(+) and Roberts(-), and the third one is a 3×3 sharpening operator. These operators process the grayscale image as follows:
[0061] In terms of storage form, a grayscale image consists of a pixel matrix, and the grayscale value of each pixel is an integer between 0 and 255; a matrix-form operator is slid on the pixel matrix, and for each pixel, a pixel block containing the current pixel and the same size as the operator is multiplied and added with the operator, that is, each grayscale value in the pixel block is multiplied by the matrix element at the corresponding position of the operator and the sum is calculated.
[0062] When using a synaptic array to handle this task, since the operator involves negative numbers and the device conductance value can only be positive, this embodiment uses a translation and scaling mapping method to map the operator's matrix element value range to the device conductance value range, and completes the translation operation by adding a bias column. The specific mapping method is as follows:
[0063]
[0064] Among them, W and G are the matrix element of the operator and the device conductivity value after mapping, respectively. The value range of W is from -W max To W max The symmetric range of G is the minimum conductance value of the device G min and the maximum conductance G max between.
[0065] In this mapping method, the voltage result read by the ADC should be transformed as follows:
[0066] V j ′=V j (ADC)×2-V bias (ADC) (4)
[0067] Among them, V j (ADC) is the same as that described in formula (2), which is the voltage value read by the ADC corresponding to the j-th column bit line; V bias (ADC) is the voltage value read by the bias column, which is fixed to G by the same row voltage passing through a column of conductance. min +G max The voltage value read after the conductivity is measured; V j 'Multiply by the coefficient W max / (G max -G min ) is the final result of the operation.
[0068] Based on the above scheme, a program is written on the Vitis platform to control the synaptic array constructed by FTJ to perform image processing with storage and computing. The processing results of the three operators are as follows: Figure 7 As shown in Figure 2, it can be seen that for the input grayscale image with a diamond pattern, the two Roberts operators correctly output the diagonal edges in the directions of 45° and 135°, and the sharpening operator correctly outputs the sharpened result of the image.
[0069] Example 3: After the electronic synapse array and its control and test system described in this application are built, the synapse array is applied to a convolutional neural network. The specific task is to achieve ten-class recognition of the numbers 0 to 9 through the reasoning operation of the convolutional neural network, such as Figure 8 The following is a schematic diagram of the structure of a small convolutional neural network provided in Example 3 of the present invention. The operations performed by each layer of the network are as follows:
[0070] The first part is a downsampling layer, which reduces the original size of 28×28 to 15×15 through pooling. This is followed by two convolutional layers, which transform the feature map size to 7×7 and 3×3 respectively. This is followed by a flattening layer and two fully-connected layers: 10 feature maps of size 3×3 are flattened into a one-dimensional vector of size 90×1. The size of the two fully-connected layers is 90×10×10. The second fully-connected layer outputs a 10×1 vector. The maximum value in the vector determines the classification of the input image, achieving the task of classifying images from 0 to 90 points in the MNIST (Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology) handwritten digit dataset.
[0071] Based on the network structure described above, a convolutional neural network program was written on the Vitis platform to perform the following functions: first, the device conductance was adjusted to the target conductance corresponding to the convolution kernel weight. Then, the array test circuit board was instructed to generate row voltage pulses corresponding to the convolution input. According to the solution described in the embodiment of the present invention, the result of the convolution operation was obtained and combined with other parts of the network to finally provide the recognition result of the input digital image on the computer.
[0072] The first layer of convolution operations is implemented on the synaptic array built in this example, and the remaining layers are calculated by the FPGA module based on the device conductance data.
[0073] Run the program to identify all images in the MNIST dataset, and based on the recognition results, such as Figure 9 The figure shows the results of implementing a small convolutional neural network inference using the electronic synapse array provided in Example 3 of the present invention, where the horizontal and vertical axes represent the predicted label and true label, respectively. Statistics show that the accuracy of recognizing 10,000 test images was 92.53%. The same LeNet network, using floating-point operations on the CPU, achieved an accuracy of 93.87%. Therefore, the inference results of the convolutional neural network using in-memory computation in this embodiment are relatively accurate.
[0074] It is worth noting that, according to calculations, the in-memory calculation method of this embodiment significantly reduces power consumption and significantly improves energy efficiency compared to the method of performing floating-point operations in the CPU.
[0075] In summary, based on the test system of the embodiment of the present invention, researchers can obtain the test data of the synaptic array and the neural network calculation results on the computer in a simple and intuitive manner, and can reduce the test cycle of the synaptic array through dynamic iterative programming. This helps to explore the potential of electronic synaptic devices to realize neural network intelligent computing at the hardware level, accelerate the development of electronic synaptic devices and their arrays that meet the requirements of artificial intelligence computing in the Internet of Things, and provide strong support for the research of brain-like devices and artificial intelligence.
[0076] In addition, those skilled in the art will understand that all or part of the steps in the above-mentioned embodiment method can be implemented by instructing the relevant hardware through a program, and the corresponding program can be stored in a computer-readable storage medium. The above-mentioned storage medium can be a read-only memory, a disk or an optical disk, etc.
[0077] The above description is only a preferred embodiment of the present invention, but the scope of protection of the present invention is not limited thereto. Any changes or substitutions that can be easily thought of by any person skilled in the art within the technical scope disclosed in the present invention should be included in the scope of protection of the present invention. Therefore, the scope of protection of the present invention should be based on the scope of protection of the claims. The information disclosed in the background technology section of this article is only intended to deepen the understanding of the overall background technology of the present invention, and should not be regarded as an admission or any form of implication that the information constitutes prior art already known to those skilled in the art.
Claims
1. A neural network testing system based on an electronic synapse array, characterized in that: The system includes a control system, an array test circuit board, and an electronic synapse array, wherein: The control system is specifically a SoC development board including an ARM module and an FPGA module, which can reconfigurably write array test and in-memory calculation programs and exchange data with a computer and an array test circuit board; The control system is connected to the array test circuit board and communicates with the inter-integrated circuit IIC protocol through the FPGA middle layer board interface; The array test circuit board comprises an analog-to-digital / digital-to-analog conversion module and a multiplexer MUX module, which are connected to the electronic synapse array via pin headers; The array test circuit board receives instructions from the control system and is used to select specific cells or rows and columns in the electronic synapse array, perform high-precision voltage writing and current reading operations on the selected cells; or provide multiple different voltage inputs to different rows of a column at the same time, and output multiple current results at the same time; The array test circuit board uses word lines WL and bit lines BL to control row and column signals of the electronic synapse array, and can select a designated unit of the electronic synapse array to switch between reading and writing; The electronic synapse array is composed of multiple non-volatile, multi-state artificial electronic synapse devices formed into an array structure with m rows and n columns through a crossbar process. The synapse is connected to the word line WL driver and the bit line BL driver of the array test circuit board through pin headers. The synapse receives input signals from the array test circuit board, and the readout signal reflects the storage state of the corresponding unit synapse device. In which, the electronic synapse array is configured as a conductance matrix, the conductance value corresponds to the synaptic weight in the neural network, and the input voltage and output current correspond to the input and output in the neural network respectively; thereby mapping the multiplication and addition convolution operations of the convolution layer and the fully connected layer in the neural network to the operation of inputting different voltages and reading parallel currents of the electronic synapse array.
2. The neural network testing system based on electronic synapse array according to claim 1, characterized in that: The computer and the ARM module communicate using the Universal Asynchronous Receiver / Transmitter (UART) protocol, which can burn programs into the SoC development board and communicate with the SoC development board. The array storage information and processing results obtained by the interaction between the SoC development board and the array test circuit board are returned to the computer for researchers to monitor.
3. The neural network testing system based on electronic synapse array according to claim 1, characterized in that: The ARM module and FPGA module communicate using an advanced extensible interface as a bus protocol, including: The ARM module communicates with the universal input / output module, the interrupt control module, the digital-to-analog conversion control module, and the analog-to-digital conversion control module of the array test circuit board through bus interconnection; The universal input / output module is used to control the MUX module in the array test circuit board. By setting the values of the word line write WL_WR, the bit line write BL_WR and the bit line read BL_RD, the rows and columns of the array test circuit board are controlled to be connected to the active channel, the inactive channel or the ground. The digital-to-analog conversion control module and the analog-to-digital conversion control module are used to control the read and write operations of the electronic synapse array, set the starting and ending values and pulse width of the input voltage of each row of the digital-to-analog conversion module; receive the output value of each column of the analog-to-digital conversion module and return it to the SoC development board and computer.
4. The neural network testing system based on electronic synapse array according to claim 1, characterized in that: The digital-to-analog conversion module DAC of the array test circuit board converts the discrete DAC code into an analog voltage input, which is then fed through a potentiometer and row strobe to a designated row of the array. The device current is fed through a column strobe to the analog-to-digital conversion module ADC, which reads the analog voltage as a discrete ADC code to reflect the current of the corresponding column. The row selector is a two-way selector. When the selector is set to "0", the row is connected to the active channel of the word line WL; when the selector is set to "1", the row is connected to the inactive channel of the word line WL. The column select is a three-way selector. When the selector is set to "0", the column is connected to the inactive channel of the bit line BL; when the selector is set to "1", the column is grounded; when the selector is set to "2", the column is connected to the bit line BL channel with the corresponding sequence number; The purpose of using active and inactive channel design is to operate the electronic synaptic device by connecting one row to the active channel and applying the write voltage V, grounding one column, and connecting the remaining rows and columns to the inactive channel and applying V / 2 or V / 3, thus reducing the impact of crosstalk in the array circuit. The column current is read by transimpedance amplification. When the column select is set to "2", the column current is first connected to the operational amplifier OPA and then through the feedback resistor R F Converted into voltage, it is read by analog-to-digital conversion module ADC after passing through low-pass filter LPF. The current value is determined by the ADC reading value and the feedback resistor R F The ratio is worth getting; Therefore, the relationship between the semaphores is: I j =∑ i G ij ×V i (1) V j (ADC)=R F ×I j (2) Among them, I j is the column current of the j-th bit line; G ij is the conductance of the electronic synaptic device at the intersection of row i and column j in the array; V i is the row voltage of the word line in row i; V j (ADC) is the voltage value read by the ADC corresponding to the j-th column bit line; R F is the feedback resistor used in the transimpedance amplifier circuit corresponding to the j-th column bit line.
5. The neural network testing system based on electronic synapse array according to claim 1, characterized in that: The clock frequency is set in the ARM module, and three different clock frequencies are generated by clock multiplication, which are used as the bus frequency, DAC frequency and ADC frequency respectively.
6. The neural network testing system based on electronic synapse array according to claim 1, characterized in that: The unit device of the electronic synapse array is subjected to conductivity control by inputting a write voltage pulse, and the current conductivity state of the device is measured by inputting a read voltage pulse and reading the output current.
7. The neural network testing system based on electronic synapse array according to claim 1, characterized in that: The indicators of the array test circuit board include: The voltage pulse width provided by the digital-to-analog conversion module DAC is at least 500ns, and the maximum amplitude of each pulse voltage is ±10V; the voltage accuracy is better than 10mV; and the maximum current that each channel can provide is 60mA; The accuracy of voltage reading is better than 1mV; the accuracy of current reading is better than 1nA; the upper limit of single-channel reading current is 3.3mA; the feedback resistor R F Take 1kΩ and 1MΩ, and read the mA and μA currents respectively.
8. The neural network testing system based on electronic synapse array according to claim 1, characterized in that: The artificial electronic synaptic device includes a ferroelectric tunnel junction, a ferroelectric field effect transistor, a resistive memory based on oxygen vacancies or metal ion migration, a phase change memory or a magnetic tunnel junction.
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