Paper detail

Investigating the impact of BTI, HCI and time-zero variability on neuromorphic spike event generation circuits

Neuromorphic computing refers to brain-inspired computers, that differentiate it from von Neumann architecture. Analog VLSI based neuromorphic circuits is a current research interest. Two simpler spiking integrate and fire neuron model namely axon-Hillock (AH) and voltage integrate, and fire (VIF) circuits are commonly used for generating spike events. This paper discusses the impact of reliability issues like Bias Temperature instability (BTI) and Hot Carrier Injection (HCI), and timezero variability on these CMOS based neuromorphic circuits. AH and VIF circuits are implemented using HKMG based 45nm technology. For reliability analysis, industry standard Cadence RelXpert tool is used. For time-zero variability analysis, 1000 Monte-Carlo simulations are performed.