Low-Power (1T1N) Skyrmionic Synapses for Spiking Neuromorphic Systems

In this work, we propose a `1-transistor 1-nanotrack' (1T1N) synapse based on movement of magnetic skyrmions using spin polarised current pulses. The proposed synaptic bit-cell has 4 terminals and fully decoupled spike transmission- and programming- paths. With careful tuning of programming parameters we ensure multi-level non-volatile conductance evolution in the proposed skyrmionic synapse. Through micromagnetic simulations, we studied in detail the impact of programming conditions (current density, pulse width) on synaptic performance parameters such as number of conductance levels and energy per transition. The programming parameters chosen used all further analysis gave rise to a synapse with 7 distinct conductance states and 1.2 fJ per conductance state transition event. Exploiting bidirectional conductance modulation the 1T1N synapse is able to undergo long-term potentiation (LTP) & depression (LTD) according to a simplified variant of biological spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) rule. We present subthreshold CMOS spike generator circuit which when coupled with well known subthreshold integrator circuit, produces custom pre and post-neuronal spike shapes, responsible for implementing unsupervised learning with the proposed 1T1N synaptic bit-cell and consuming ~ 0.25 pJ/event. A spiking neural network (SNN) incorporating the characteristics of the 1T1N synapse was simulated for two seperate applications: pattern extraction from noisy video streams and MNIST classification.