title: Event management for large scale event-driven digital hardware spiking neural networks.
abstract: The interest in brain-like computation has led to the design of a plethora of innovative neuromorphic systems. Individually, spiking neural networks (SNNs), event-driven simulation and digital hardware neuromorphic systems get a lot of attention. Despite the popularity of event-driven SNNs in software, very few digital hardware architectures are found. This is because existing hardware solutions for event management scale badly with the number of events. This paper introduces the structured heap queue, a pipelined digital hardware data structure, and demonstrates its suitability for event management. The structured heap queue scales gracefully with the number of events, allowing the efficient implementation of large scale digital hardware event-driven SNNs. The scaling is linear for memory, logarithmic for logic resources and constant for processing time. The use of the structured heap queue is demonstrated on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) with an image segmentation experiment and a SNN of 65,536 neurons and 513,184 synapses. Events can be processed at the rate of 1 every 7 clock cycles and a 406×158 pixel image is segmented in 200 ms.
authors.affiliation: NECOTIS, Université de Sherbrooke, 2500 boul. de l'Université, Sherbrooke (Québec), J1K 2R1, Canada. lcaron@ensta.fr
authors.forename: Louis-Charles
authors.initials: LC
authors.lastname: Caron
authors.forename: Michiel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: D'Haene
authors.forename: Frédéric
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Mailhot
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Schrauwen
authors.forename: Jean
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rouat
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003201:Computers; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation*
keywords: Event-driven simulation; Field-programmable gate array; Neuromorphic engineering; Pipelined heap queue; Spiking neural network