Thermal optimization for memristor-based hybrid neuromorphic computing systems

Neuromorphic computing is used for accelerating the computation of neural network which can simulate the brain of animal and composed by neurons and synapses. However, the neuromorphic computing with the traditional computer architecture leads to serious von Neumann bottleneck because of the gap between high frequency CPU computation and memory access. The emerging memristor is an innovation technology for future VLSI circuits potentially can be acted as both data storage and computing unit to transform the computer architecture. Furthermore, the characteristics of memristors include low programming energy, parallel process, small footprint, non-volatility, etc, which have attracted significant researches on neuromorphic computing. However, some important issues such as thermal damage defect the reliability of memristors. High thermal of memristor is a critical issue which impacts the reliability of the systems. To estimate the thermal of the memristor, we formulated the thermal as the power consumption problem. In this paper, a thermal optimization algorithm for memristor-based hybrid neuromorphic computing system is proposed to solve the the reliability issue by the incremental cluster network flow. Our results show that the maximum power consumption can be reduced about 31%.