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To analyze the effect of the intrinsic variations of the memristor device on the neuromorphic system, we fabricated 32 × 32 Al2O3/TiO x -based memristor crossbar array and implemented 3 bit multilevel conductance as weight quantization by utilizing the switching characteristics to minimize the performance degradation of the neural network. The tuning operation for 8 weight levels was confirmed with a tolerance of ±4 μ A (±40 μ S). The endurance and retention characteristics were also verified, and the random telegraph noise (RTN) characteristics were measured according to the weight range to evaluate the internal stochastic variation effect. Subsequently, a memristive neural network was constructed by off-chip training with differential memristor pairs for the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) handwritten dataset. The pre-trained weights were quantized, and the classification accuracy was evaluated by applying the intrinsic variations to each quantized weight. The intrinsic variations were applied using the measured weight inaccuracy given by the tuning tolerance, RTN characteristics, and the fault device yield. We believe these results should be considered when the pre-trained weights are transferred to a memristive neural network by off-chip training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and relevant hardware technologies has been developed rapidly, algorithms and network structures have become significantly complicated, causing serious power consumption issues because an enormous amount of computation is required. Neuromorphic computing, a hardware AI technology with memory devices, has emerged to solve this problem. For this application, multilevel operations of synaptic devices are important to imitate floating point weight values in software AI technologies. Furthermore, weight transfer methods to desired weight targets must be arranged for off-chip training. From this point of view, we fabricate 32 × 32 memristor crossbar array and verify the 3-bit multilevel operations. The programming accuracy is verified for 3-bit quantized levels by applying a reset-voltage-control programming scheme to the fabricated TiO x /Al 2 O 3 -based memristor array. After that, a synapse composed of two differential memristors and a fully-connected neural network for modified national institute of standards and technology (MNIST) pattern recognition are constructed. The trained weights are post-training quantized in consideration of the 3-bit characteristics of the memristor. Finally, the effect of programming error on classification accuracy is verified based on the measured data, and we obtained 98.12% classification accuracy for MNIST data with the programming accuracy of 1.79% root-mean-square-error. These results imply that the proposed reset-voltage-control programming scheme can be utilized for a precise tuning, and expected to contribute for the development of a neuromorphic system capable of highly precise weight transfer., (© 2021 IOP Publishing Ltd.)