Robust Hardware-Aware Neural Networks for FeFET-Based Accelerators

Hardware accelerators based on emerging device technologies are gaining traction for inference workloads, but effective methods for their training remain an open area of research. We propose an efficient hardware-aware methodology for training neural networks with ternary weights that are mappable to emerging memory device arrays. We study device-network interactions across a variety of scenarios using simulated and experimentally measured datasets from ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) devices with varying characteristics. We quantify the impact of device non-idealities on network training by investigating device-level metrics, network-level metrics, loss landscapes, as well as parameter optimization trajectories. We validate our approach by mapping a hardware-aware solution to an emulated system with parameters calibrated to experimental measurements, highlighting several trade-offs. Hardware-aware training results on FeFET-based multi-layer perceptron networks, long short-term memory networks, and deep convolutional networks demonstrate competitive performance at lower overheads compared to existing schemes, indicating architectural and computational scalability. It is found that devices with low variability, non-linearity, and high dynamic range exhibit training characteristics closest to a software baseline. We provide evidence that device non-idealities inject noise during backpropagation, leading to sharper loss landscapes and higher-dimensional optimization trajectories, which make device networks more difficult to train than software counterparts. We also identify optimal operating voltages for investigated devices by utilizing our hardware-aware training and inference methodologies.