YANA: Bridging the Neuromorphic Simulation-to-Hardware Gap

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03432v1
• Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:03:11 GMT
• Title: YANA: Bridging the Neuromorphic Simulation-to-Hardware Gap
• Abstract summary: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise significant advantages over conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)<n>Yet Another Neuromorphic Accelerator (YANA) provides an accessible hardware and software framework for neuromorphic computing.<n> Deployed on the AMD Kria KR260 platform, a single YANA core utilizes 740 LUTs, 918 registers, 7 BRAMS and 24 URAMs, supporting up to $217$ synapses and $210$ neurons.
• Score: 0.559314565030237
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise significant advantages over conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for applications requiring real-time processing of temporally sparse data streams under strict power constraints -- a concept known as the Neuromorphic Advantage. However, the limited availability of neuromorphic hardware creates a substantial simulation-to-hardware gap that impedes algorithmic innovation, hardware-software co-design, and the development of mature open-source ecosystems. To address this challenge, we introduce Yet Another Neuromorphic Accelerator (YANA), an FPGA-based digital SNN accelerator designed to bridge this gap by providing an accessible hardware and software framework for neuromorphic computing. YANA implements a five-stage, event-driven processing pipeline that fully exploits temporal and spatial sparsity while supporting arbitrary SNN topologies through point-to-point neuron connections. The architecture features an input preprocessing scheme that maintains steady event processing at one event per cycle without buffer overflow risks, and implements hardware-efficient event-driven neuron updates using lookup tables for leak calculations. We demonstrate YANA's sparsity exploitation capabilities through experiments on the Spiking Heidelberg Digits dataset, showing near-linear scaling of inference time with both spatial and temporal sparsity levels. Deployed on the accessible AMD Kria KR260 platform, a single YANA core utilizes 740 LUTs, 918 registers, 7 BRAMS and 24 URAMs, supporting up to $2^{17}$ synapses and $2^{10}$ neurons. We release the YANA framework as an open-source project, providing an end-to-end solution for training, optimizing, and deploying SNNs that integrates with existing neuromorphic computing tools through the Neuromorphic Intermediate Representation (NIR).

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