Fault tolerance analysis of digital feed-forward deep neural networks

As the homeostatis characteristics of nerve systems show, artificial neural networks are considered to be robust to variation of circuit components and interconnection faults. However, the tolerance of neural networks depends on many factors, such as the fault model, the network size, and the training method. In this study, we analyze the fault tolerance of fixed-point feed-forward deep neural networks for the implementation in CMOS digital VLSI. The circuit errors caused by the interconnection as well as the processing units are considered. In addition to the conventional and dropout training methods, we develop a new technique that randomly disconnects weights during the training to increase the error resiliency. Feed-forward deep neural networks for phoneme recognition are employed for the experiments.