The applications of memristor devices in next-generation cortical processor designs

Discovery of memristor opened a new era of the research on universal memory thanks to many attractive properties demonstrated by this emerging device. In this paper, we switch our research focus to neuromorphic computing, which, same as memory technology, significantly benefits from the technical advances of memristor. Particularly, we present the implementation of cortical processor augmented with neuromorphic computing accelerators (NCAs) for cognitive applications, including: 1) the design details and basic operations of the NCA based on memristor crossbars; and 2) the integration between conventional pipeline and NCAs. At the end, we also discuss the scalability of our proposed NCA designs.