Syn2Logic: End-to-End Neuromorphic Design Automation

Abstract

In this work, we propose a view on electronic Neuromorphic Design Automation (eNDA), which we see as a design automation flow that bridges computational neuroscience modeling with traditional Electronic Design Automation (EDA) flow. We introduce the term, give examples of how it can be implemented, and design a prototype implementation: Syn2Logic. Syn2Logic is an entire eNDA framework, that allows neuroscientists to model neural behavior using a custom DSL and a compiler that takes the same model description down to synthesizable RTL hardware. We end the paper by applying the eNDA-flow through Syn2Logic to show how to -- without writing a single line of hardware description language (HDL) code-- (i) generate what we believe is the fastest C. elegans accelerator that runs significantly faster than state-of-the-art simulators, (ii) create (to the best of our knowledge) the fastest, most generic neuromorphic sudoku solver that outperforms CP-SAT and SCIP on TOP1465 puzzles, and (iii) create a 5.6 million FPS/Watt accelerator on a tiny FPGA that outperforms existing neuromorphic architectures in terms of speed and energy-efficiency on the MNIST dataset.