Mitigating the Effect of Reliability Soft-errors of RRAM Devices on the Performance of RRAM-based Neuromorphic Systems

With the speed and power bottleneck in the conventional Von Neumann architecture, the interest in the neuromorphic systems has greatly increased in recent years. To create a highly dense communication network between the pre- and post-neurons, RRAM devices are used as synapses in the neuromorphic systems due to many advantages including their small sizes and low-power operations. However, due to RRAM reliability issues, in particular soft-errors, the performance of the RRAM-based neuromorphic systems are significantly degraded. In this article, we propose a novel framework for detecting and resolving the degradation in the system performance due to the RRAM reliability soft-errors. The read and write circuits modifications to implement the framework, and their impact on the delay and energy consumption of the neuromorphic system are also discussed in this article. Using a combination of BRIAN and SPICE simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can restore the accuracy of the example RRAM-based neuromorphic system from 43% back to its target value of 91.6% with a minimal impact on the read (< 0.1% and 1.1% increase in the delay and energy respectively) and write (0% and < 0.1% increase in the delay and energy respectively) operations.