Impact of Oscillator Phase Noise on Time-Domain SNN Performance

Abstract

Spiking neural networks have gained interests for its event-driven nature and good energy efficiency. As voltage-domain neurons suffer from accuracy degradation by circuit nonlinearities, time-domain neurons have been recently proposed. However, the impact of oscillator phase noise on SNN performance has not been considered in prior studies. This paper investigates the amount of accuracy degradation due to the phase noise of the time-domain neuron. To this end, the phase noise of a time-domain integrator is simulated in a 28nm CMOS process, and the noise is modeled in the system-level simulation to evaluate the SNN performance.