R&D: 4K-Memristor Analog-Grade Passive Crossbar Circuit

Nature Communications has published an article written by H. Kim, present address: Department of Electronic Engineering of Inha University, Incheon, Korea, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, M. R. Mahmoodi, H. Nili, and D. B. Strukov, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.

Abstract: “The superior density of passive analog-grade memristive crossbar circuits enables storing large neural network models directly on specialized neuromorphic chips to avoid costly off-chip communication. To ensure efficient use of such circuits in neuromorphic systems, memristor variations must be substantially lower than those of active memory devices. Here we report a 64 × 64 passive crossbar circuit with ~99% functional nonvolatile metal-oxide memristors. The fabrication technology is based on a foundry-compatible process with etch-down patterning and a low-temperature budget. The achieved <26% coefficient of variance in memristor switching voltages is sufficient for programming a 4K-pixel gray-scale pattern with a <4% relative tuning error on average. Analog properties are also successfully verified via experimental demonstration of a 64 × 10 vector-by-matrix multiplication with an average 1% relative conductance import accuracy to model the MNIST image classification by ex-situ trained single-layer perceptron, and modeling of a large-scale multilayer perceptron classifier based on more advanced conductance tuning algorithm.“