Parameter Exploration to Improve Performance of Memristor-Based Neuromorphic Architectures

The brain-inspired spiking neural network neuromorphic architecture offers a promising solution for a wide set of cognitive computation tasks at a very low power consumption. Due to the practical feasibility of hardware implementation, we present a memristor-based model of hardware spiking neural networks which we simulate with Neural Network Scalable Spiking Simulator (N2S3), our open source neuromorphic architecture simulator. Although Spiking neural networks are widely used in the community of computational neuroscience and neuromorphic computation, there is still a need for research on the methods to choose the optimum parameters for better recognition efficiency. With the help of our simulator, we analyze and evaluate the impact of different parameters such as number of neurons, STDP window, neuron threshold, distribution of input spikes, and memristor model parameters on the MNIST hand-written digit recognition problem. We show that a careful choice of a few parameters (number of neurons, kind of synapse, STDP window, and neuron threshold) can significantly improve the recognition rate on this benchmark (around 15 points of improvement for the number of neurons, a few points for the others) with a variability of four to five points of recognition rate due to the random initialization of the synaptic weights.