Memristive non-idealities: Is there any practical implications for designing neural network chips?

The impact of device-to-device, cycle-to-cycle, and parasitic variations in memristor devices on the performance of neural network architectures is not a fully understood topic. In this paper, we present an explicit analysis of memristor variabilities and non-idealities of memristive crossbar based learning architectures. The measurements of real devices and their effects on dot product operation in a memristive crossbar is reported. The effect of these non-idealities, limited resistive levels and variabilities on the performance and reliability of two-layer Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Binary Neural Network (BNN) is analyzed and presented.