A Unified Hardware/Software Co-Design Framework for Neuromorphic Computing Devices and Applications

With the death of Moore's law, the computing community is in a period of exploration, focusing on novel computing devices, paradigms, and techniques for programming. The TENN-Lab group has developed a hardware/software co- design framework for this exploration, on which we perform research with three thrusts: (1) Devices for computing, such as memristors and biomimetic membranes. (2) Applications that employ spiking neural networks for processing. (3) Machine learning techniques to program. The design framework is unified, because it allows all three thrusts to work in concert, so that, for example, new results on device design can apply instantly to the current results of applications and learning. In this paper, we detail the interweaving components of the design framework. We then describe case studies on each of the research thrusts above, highlighting how the unified framework is enabling to each case study.