Memristor-Aware-Training for Resilient Neural Networks
Published:
Memristors: a controversial technology with as many supporters as critics. Memristors have attracted considerable attention in the edge-AI industry as a promising memory technology capable of improving energy efficiency and integration density by orders of magnitude compared with standard integrated memory. However, the memristive revolution has been hindered (or delayed) by many technical difficulties. Among these is the problem of variability, i.e., the stochastic behavior memristors exhibit in their conductance during programming. Is it a dealbreaker? This article shows how to address memristive-conductance variability with a particular training methodology inspired by Quantization-Aware-Training, a method used to train heavily quantized networks. The so-called Memristor-Aware-Training introduces memristor-calibrated variability during training so that optimization can adapt to it and converge to a stable weight configuration that tolerates variability.