Abstract: Apparatus and method for configuring large numbers of fan-in and fan-out connections in a neuromorphic computer. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a plurality of neurons, each neuron uniquely identifiable with a neuron identifier (ID); at least one memory to store neuron addresses with wildcard values to establish fan-in and/or fan-out connections between the neurons; and a router to translate at least one neuron address containing wildcard values into two or more neuron IDs to establish the fan-in and/or fan-out connections between the neurons.

Abstract: Apparatus and method for a scalable, free running neuromorphic processor. For example, one embodiment of a neuromorphic processing apparatus comprises: a plurality of neurons; an interconnection network to communicatively couple at least a subset of the plurality of neurons; a spike controller to stochastically generate a trigger signal, the trigger signal to cause a selected neuron to perform a thresholding operation to determine whether to issue a spike signal.

Abstract: In one embodiment, a processor is to store a membrane potential of a neural unit of a neural network; and calculate, at a particular time-step of the neural network, a change to the membrane potential of the neural unit occurring over multiple time-steps that have elapsed since the last time-step at which the membrane potential was updated, wherein each of the multiple time-steps that have elapsed since the last time-step is associated with at least one input to the neural unit that affects the membrane potential of the neural unit.

Abstract: An integrated circuit (IC), as a computation block of a neuromorphic system, includes a time step controller to activate a time step update signal for performing a time-multiplexed selection of a group of neuromorphic states to update. The IC includes a first circuitry to, responsive to detecting the time step update signal for a selected group of neuromorphic states: generate an outgoing data signal in response to determining that a first membrane potential of the selected group of neuromorphic states exceeds a threshold value, wherein the outgoing data signal includes an identifier that identifies the selected group of neuromorphic states and a memory address (wherein the memory address corresponds to a location in a memory block associated with the integrated circuit), and update a state of the selected group of neuromorphic states in response to generation of the outgoing data signal.

Abstract: An information processor is provided that includes an inference module configured to extract a subset of data from information in an input and a classification module configured to classify the information in the input based on the extracted data. The inference module includes a first plurality of convolvers acting in parallel to apply each of N1 convolution kernels to each of N2 portions of the input image in order to generate an interim sparse representation of the input and a second plurality of convolvers acting in parallel to apply each of N3 convolution kernels to each of N4 portions of the interim sparse representation to generate a final sparse representation containing the extracted data. In order to take advantage of sparsity in the interim sparse representation, N3 is greater than N4 to parallelize processing in a non-sparse dimension and/or the second plurality of convolvers comprise sparse convolvers.

Abstract: A sparse coding system. The sparse coding system comprises a neural network including a plurality of neurons each having a respective feature associated therewith and each being configured to be electrically connected to every other neuron in the network and to a portion of an input dataset. The plurality of neurons are arranged in a plurality of neuron clusters each comprising a respective subset of the plurality of neurons, and the neurons in each cluster are electrically connected to one another in a bus structure, and the plurality of clusters are electrically connected together in a ring structure. Also provided is a sparse coding system that comprises an inference module configured to extract features from an input image containing an object, wherein the inference module comprises an implementation of a sparse coding algorithm, and a classifier configured to classify the object in the input image based on the extracted features.