IEEE Access (Jan 2020)

Double-Gated Asymmetric Floating-Gate-Based Synaptic Device for Effective Performance Enhancement Through Online Learning

  • Donghyun Ryu,
  • Tae-Hyung Kim,
  • Taejin Jang,
  • Junsu Yu,
  • Jong-Ho Lee,
  • Byung-Gook Park

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3041734
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8
pp. 217735 – 217743

Abstract

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In this paper, we propose a floating-gate-based synaptic transistor with two independent control gates that implement both offline and online learning. Unlike previous research on double-gated synaptic transistors, the proposed device is capable of online learning without facing a fan-out problem. Basic operation of the device was verified and a program/erase scheme based on Fowler-Northeim tunneling is suggested for the multi-conductance utilization of the synaptic device. With the proposed P/E scheme, an offline-trained single-layered hardware-based spiking neural network was simulated for MNIST classification, resulting in 87.37% classification accuracy with 10% conductance variation. To alleviate this performance degradation, the online learning method is applied on the offline-trained SNN by reusing 3,000 training images. The effectiveness of the proposed method is also verified under existence of the synaptic weight variance. As a result, up to 86.89% of the performance degradation is alleviated.

Keywords