Energy-efficient stochastic computing with superparamagnetic tunnel junctions

Published

March 5, 2020

Author(s)

Matthew W. Daniels, Advait Madhavan, Philippe Talatchian, Alice Mizrahi, Mark D. Stiles

Abstract

Stochastic computing has been limited by the inaccuracies introduced by correlations between the pseudorandom bitstreams used in the calculation. We hybridize a stochastic version of magnetic tunnel junctions with basic CMOS logic gates to create a SuperPARamagnetic-Tunnel- junction-Array Network (Spartan) that drastically reduces the impact of correlations. Superparamagnetic tunnel junctions implement low energy, truly random bitstreams. We exploit this true randomness by using OR-gate-based neurons to provide both the summation and nonlinear operation of a neuron with superior energy efficiency. Simulating Spartan on a commonly implemented convolutional neural network structure allows for a systematic evaluation of accuracy and energy. The present iteration of Spartan achieves 97.2~\% accuracy on MNIST while consuming only 70~nJ per inference---an order of magnitude less energy than previous stochastic implementations.

Citation

Physical Review Applied

Volume

13

Issue

3

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.13.034016

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Keywords

Stochastic computing, magnetic tunnel junction, neural network, random number generation, decorrelation, unary encoding, thermal fluctuations, computational stack codesign

Citation

Daniels, M. , Madhavan, A. , Talatchian, P. , Mizrahi, A. and Stiles, M. (2020), Energy-efficient stochastic computing with superparamagnetic tunnel junctions, Physical Review Applied, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.13.034016 (Accessed October 24, 2025)