Pruning for Hardware-Based Deep Spiking Neural Networks Using Gated Schottky Diode as Synaptic Devices.

Deep learning represents state-of-the-art results in various machine learning tasks, but for applications that require real-time inference, the high computational cost of deep neural networks becomes a bottleneck for the efficiency. To overcome the high computational cost of deep neural networks, spiking neural networks (SNN) have been proposed. Herein, we propose a hardware implementation of the SNN with gated Schottky diodes as synaptic devices. In addition, we apply L1 regularization for connection pruning of the deep spiking neural networks using gated Schottky diodes as synap-tic devices. Applying L1 regularization eliminates the need for a re-training procedure because it prunes the weights based on the cost function. The compressed hardware-based SNN is energy efficient while achieving a classification accuracy of 97.85% which is comparable to 98.13% of the software deep neural networks (DNN).