Programming Spiking Neural Networks on Intel's Loihi

Chit-Kwan Lin, Andreas Wild, Gautham N. Chinya, Yongqiang Cao, Mike Davies, Daniel M. Lavery, Hong Wang

Abstract: Loihi is Intel’s novel, manycore neuromorphic processor and is the first of its kind to feature a microcode-programmable learning engine that enables on-chip training of spiking neural networks (SNNs). The authors present the Loihi toolchain, which consists of an intuitive Python-based API for specifying SNNs, a compiler and runtime for building and executing SNNs on Loihi, and several target platforms (Loihi silicon, FPGA, and functional simulator). To showcase the toolchain, the authors describe how to build, train, and use a SNN to classify handwritten digits from the MNIST database.