XBarNet: Computationally Efficient Memristor Crossbar Model Using Convolutional Autoencoder

The design and verification of memristor crossbar circuits and systems demand computationally efficient models. The conventional device-level memristor model with a circuit simulator such as simulation program with integrated circuit emphasis (SPICE) to solve a memristor crossbar is time exhaustive. Hence, we propose a neural network-based memristor crossbar modeling method, XBarNet. By transforming memristor crossbar modeling to pixel-to-pixel regression, XBarNet avoids the iterative procedure in the conventional SPICE method, accelerating the runtime significantly. Meanwhile, XBarNet models the interconnect resistance and nonlinear I-V effect of memristor crossbars, which minimizes the simulation errors. We first propose a feature extraction method to bridge a memristor crossbar circuit and a neural network. Then, the network based on the convolutional autoencoder architecture is developed and the filter pruning technique is applied onto XBarNet to reduce the runtime computational cost. The experimental result shows our proposed XBarNet achieves over 78× runtime speed up and 1.7× memory reduction with only 0.28% relative error comparing to the SPICE simulator.