The goal of the NEUROKIT2E project is to create an open-source Deep Learning framework for edge and embedded AI built around an established European value chain. This framework, called AIDGE, supports a wide range of application areas that operate independently and serve a global user community. It provides easy and fast full-stack solutions from Neural Network design and optimization to AI application development all the way down to hardware implementations while enabling code generation for application-specific targets. This platform provides flexibility for academic users in the AI domain to explore and innovate while allowing them the possibility to prototype systems, ensuring their work aligns well with industrial needs. This paper presents the results and achievements of the first part of this three-year project, along with its roadmap and expected outcomes.

This paper introduces SENMap, a mapping and synthesis tool for a scalable energy efficient neuromorphic computing architecture frameworks. SENECA a flexible architectural design optimized for executing edge AI SNN/ANN inference applications efficiently. To speed up the silicon tapeout and chip design for SENECA, an accurate emulator SENSIM was designed. While SENSIM supports direct mapping of SNNs on neuromorphic architectures, as the SNN/ANN grow in size, achieving optimal mapping for objectives like energy, throughput, area, and accuracy becomes challenging. This paper introduces SENMap, flexible mapping software for efficiently mapping large SNN/ANN applications onto adaptable architectures. SENMap considers architectural, pretrained SNN/ANN realistic examples, and event rate-based parameters and is open-sourced along with SENSIM to aid flexible neuromorphic chip design before fabrication. Experimental results show SENMap enables 40 percent energy improvements for a baseline SENSIM operating on timestep asynchronous mode of operation. SENMap is designed in such a way that it facilitates mapping large spiking neural networks for future modifications as well.

In this paper, we present SENSIM, which is an open-source simulator designed specifically for the SENECA neuromorphic processor. This simulator is unique in that it combines features from both hardware-specific and hardware-agnostic spiking neural network simulators, resulting in a hybrid event-driven and time-step-driven simulation approach. This allows for flexibility between accuracy and speed during different stages of simulation. Our work highlights the open-source SENSIM platform, which enables the mapping of large-scale SNN/DNN models to the SENECA cores, as well as the benchmarking of crucial KPIs such as power and latency estimations.