Neuromorphic computing systems are promising alternatives in the fields of pattern recognition, image processing, etc. especially when conventional von Neumann architectures face several bottlenecks. Memristors play vital roles in neuromorphic computing systems and are usually used as synaptic devices. Memristive spiking neural networks (MSNNs) are considered to be more efficient and biologically plausible than other systems due to their spike-based working mechanism. In contrast to previous SNNs with complex architectures, we propose a hardware-friendly architecture and an unsupervised spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) learning method for MSNNs in this paper. The architecture, which is friendly to hardware implementation, includes an input layer, a feature learning layer and a voting circuit. To reduce hardware complexity, some constraints are enforced: the proposed architecture has no lateral inhibition and is purely feedforward; it uses the voting circuit as a classifier and does not use additional classifiers; all neurons can generate at most one spike and do not need to consider firing rates and refractory periods; all neurons have the same fixed threshold voltage for classification. The presented unsupervised STDP learning method is time-dependent and uses no homeostatic mechanism. The MNIST dataset is used to demonstrate our proposed architecture and learning method. Simulation results show that our proposed architecture with the learning method achieves a classification accuracy of 94.6%, which outperforms other unsupervised SNNs that use time-based encoding schemes.
A biologically plausible supervised learning method for spiking neural networks using the symmetric STDP rule
