A Current Attenuator for Efficient Memristive Crossbars Read-Out

Abstract

This paper presents a new current attenuator circuit to scale down the inference currents in memristor based crossbars that drive integrate-and-fire neurons, which subsequently allows to reduce the size of integrating capacitors by several orders of magnitude, making IC integration possible. The proposed circuit uses a linear switch to divide the inference current and scale it down by a factor of about 104. The proposed attenuator has been designed in 130nm CMOS technology. Simulation results considering noise, process and temperature variations are shown to validate the presented approach.