研究目的
To introduce Minitaur, an event-driven neural network accelerator designed for low power and high performance, capable of integrating into existing robotics or offloading computationally expensive neural network tasks from the CPU.
研究成果
Minitaur is introduced as a spiking network accelerator with a performance of 18.73 million PSCs/second, consuming just 1.5 W of power. It achieves 92% accuracy on the MNIST handwritten digit classification and 71% accuracy on the 20 newsgroups classification data set. The system is robust to noise and allows for progressive refinement of results, making it suitable for real-time systems and embedded robotics applications.
研究不足
The current design has a benchmarked USB-to-USB latency of 236 μs, primarily dominated by the latency of the operating system issuing USB read and writes. The system's performance is limited by memory bandwidth and the need for effective training methods for LIF-spike-based systems.