Noise tailoring, noise annealing, and external perturbation injection strategies in memristive Hopfield neural networks

The commercial introduction of a novel electronic device is often preceded by a lengthy material optimization phase devoted to the suppression of device noise as much as possible. The emergence of novel computing architectures, however, triggers a paradigm shift in noise engineering, demonstrating that non-suppressed but properly tailored noise can be harvested as a computational resource in probabilistic computing schemes. Such a strategy was recently realized on the hardware level in memristive Hopfield neural networks, delivering fast and highly energy efficient optimization performance. Inspired by these achievements, we perform a thorough analysis of simulated memristive Hopfield neural networks relying on realistic noise characteristics acquired on various memristive devices. These characteristics highlight the possibility of orders of magnitude variations in the noise level depending on the material choice as well as on the resistance state (and the corresponding active region volume) of the devices. Our simulations separate the effects of various device non-idealities on the operation of the Hopfield neural network by investigating the role of the programming accuracy as well as the noise-type and noise amplitude of the ON and OFF states. Relying on these results, we propose optimized noise tailoring and noise annealing strategies, comparing the impact of internal noise to the effect of external perturbation injection schemes.