Experimental Demonstration and Tolerancing of a Large-Scale Neural Network (165 000 Synapses) Using Phase-Change Memory as the Synaptic Weight Element

Using two phase-change memory devices per synapse, a three-layer perceptron network with 164 885 synapses is trained on a subset (5000 examples) of the MNIST database of handwritten digits using a backpropagation variant suitable for nonvolatile memory (NVM) + selector crossbar arrays, obtaining a training (generalization) accuracy of 82.2% (82.9%). Using a neural network simulator matched to the experimental demonstrator, extensive tolerancing...