A Spiking Neural Network with Resistively Coupled Synapses Using Time-to-First-Spike Coding Towards Efficient Charge-Domain Computing

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are expected to be energy efficient when implemented on dedicated hardware. However, fully exploiting SNN’s characteristics such as event-driven communications challenges on circuit designers and manufacturers. In this paper, inspired by the recent success of an artificial neural network (ANN) based system, known as charge-domain computing (CDC), we propose a novel framework for SNNs called “RC-Spike.” As CDC, RC-Spike uses a two-phase system: input spikes are received in the accumulation phase, and a neuron produces a spike in the spike generation phase. In RC-Spike, synaptic currents are accumulated with resistively coupled synapses, with which circuit implementation can be simplified compared with CDC circuits. Because of this resistive coupling effect, a neuron in RC-Spike does not compute an exact dot product. However, RC-Spike can be successfully trained in the framework of SNNs, and we show that the learning performance of RC-Spike is as high as ANNs on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets.