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Ultra-Compact Neural Network ADC Exploiting Ferroelectric FET
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  • Ayan Banerjee ,
  • Sagnik Bhattacharya ,
  • Yogesh Singh Chauhan ,
  • Shubham Sahay
Ayan Banerjee
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Sagnik Bhattacharya
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Yogesh Singh Chauhan
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Shubham Sahay
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Abstract

Development of ultra-compact, low-to-medium precision analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) with unprecedented energy-efficiency is essential to meet the ever-increasing demand for data converters in advanced computing systems including neuromorphic accelerators based on emerging non-volatile memories. To this end, in this work, for the first time, we propose a feedforward neural network ADC based on a network of highly scalable, CMOS-compatible, and energy-efficient ferroelectric-FinFET (Fe-FinFET) synaptic elements. Our lower triangular neural network (LTNN) ADC design, implemented using 7-nm technology from ARM along with an experimentally calibrated compact model for Fe-FinFETs, consumes 5.44 μW of power, 1.03 μm2 of area while operating at a speed of 1.23 megasamples per second for 4-bit precision. The proposed neural network ADC may pave the way for realization of highly efficient neuromorphic processing engines and neuro-optimizers based on cross-point array of emerging non-volatile memories.