Solution to alleviate the impact of line resistance on the crossbar array

Abstract

The crossbar array implementing the weighted sum computation and weight update operation is a promisinghardware accelerator for neuromorphic computing. However, the voltage drop caused by the current flowing through the accesslines could be aggressive for the resistive crossbar array in a fully parallel fashion. In this study, the authors analysed the impactof the line resistance on the crossbar array based on the SPICE simulation. It implies that the scale of the crossbar array andthe ratio of line resistance to resistive random access memory resistance bring great influence on the performance of thecrossbar array. Also an scheme of optimisation has been proposed to diminish its influence. Furthermore, considering lineresistance, multi-layer perceptron based on crossbar array has been simulated with SPICE on Modified National Institute ofStandards and Technology dataset. Those results could provide design guidelines for the practical hardware implementation ofthe neuromorphic accelerator.