Stochastic Computing Architectures: Modeling, Optimization, and Applications

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), the design and implementation of very large-scale integrated circuits (VLSI) based on traditional binary computation are facing challenges of high complexity, computational power, and high power consumption. The development of Moore’s law has reached the limit of physical technology, and there is an urgent need to explore new computing architectures to make up for the shortcomings of traditional binary computing. To address the existing problems, Stochastic Computing (SC) is an unconventional stochastic sequence that converts binary numbers into a coded stream of digital pulses. It has a remarkable symmetry with binary computation. It uses logic gate circuits in the probabilistic domain to implement complex arithmetic operations at the expense of computational accuracy and time. It has low power and logic resource consumption and a small circuit area. This paper analyzes the basic concepts and development history of SC and neural networks (NNs), summarizes the development progress of SC with NN at home and abroad, and discusses the development trend of SC and the future challenges and prospects of NN. Through systematic summarization, this paper provides new learning ideas and research directions for developing AI chips.