SupraSNN: Exploiting Synapse-Level Parallelism in Spiking Neural Network Accelerators through Co-Optimized Mapping and Scheduling
The problem is that deploying Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on hardware is limited by the challenge of managing massive parallelism, analogous to the historical barrier of serial execution in processors. The method introduces SupraSNN, a superscalar-inspired hardware-software co-design framework that treats synaptic events as parallelizable micro-operations, using a Multi-Cast Tree, parallel Synapse Processing Units, and a Merge Tree with a unified Neuron Unit. Experimental evidence shows that on a Xilinx Zynq XC7Z020 FPGA, SupraSNN achieves 149 μs inference latency and 0.025 mJ per image for MNIST (93.44% accuracy), delivering 47.6% lower latency and 5.6× better energy efficiency than prior FPGA-based SNN accelerators. This matters because it demonstrates a practical path to high synapse-level parallelism and energy efficiency for SNN deployment, extending to recurrent SNNs on the Spiking Heidelberg Dataset.