A Brain-Inspired Homeostatic Neuron Based on Phase-Change Memories for Efficient Neuromorphic Computing

One of the main goals of neuromorphic computing is the implementation and design of systems capable of dynamic evolution with respect to their own experience. In biology, synaptic scaling is the homeostatic mechanism which controls the frequency of neural spikes within stable boundaries for improved learning activity. To introduce such control mechanism in a hardware spiking neural network (SNN), we present here a novel artificial neuron based on phase change memory (PCM) devices capable of internal regulation via homeostatic and plastic phenomena. We experimentally show that this mechanism increases the robustness of the system thus optimizing the multi-pattern learning under spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). It also improves the continual learning capability of hybrid supervised-unsupervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in terms of both resilience and accuracy. Furthermore, the use of neurons capable of self-regulating their fire responsivity as a function of the PCM internal state enables the design of dynamic networks. In this scenario, we propose to use the PCM-based neurons to design bio-inspired recurrent networks for autonomous decision making in navigation tasks. The agent relies on neuronal spike-frequency adaptation (SFA) to explore the environment via penalties and rewards. Finally, we show that the conductance drift of the PCM devices, contrarily to the applications in neural network accelerators, can improve the overall energy efficiency of neuromorphic computing by implementing bio-plausible active forgetting.