Neuromorphic Parameter Estimation for Power Converter Health Monitoring Using Spiking Neural Networks

Neuromorphic computing aims to improve the efficiency of artificial neural networks by taking inspiration from biological neurons and leveraging temporal sparsity, spatial sparsity, and compute near/in memory. Although these approaches have shown efficiency gains, training these spiking neural networks (SNN) remains difficult. The original attempts at converting trained conventional analog neural networks (ANN) to SNNs used the rate of binary spikes to represent neuron activations. This required many simulation time steps per inference, which degraded efficiency. Intel's Loihi 2 is a neuromorphic platform that supports graded spikes which can be used to represent changes in neuron activation. In this work, we use Loihi 2's graded spikes to develop a method for converting ANN networks to spiking networks, which exploits temporal and spatial sparsity. We evaluated the performance of this network on Loihi 2 and compared it to NVIDIA's Jetson Xavier edge AI platform. The results show that neuromorphic approaches achieve significant improvements in efficiency and latency (energy-delay product) over existing solutions.

Energy-efficient neuromorphic computing at the edge requires simulation tools that can capture the non-ideal behavior of mixed-signal spiking neural network (SNN) hardware while supporting system-level design exploration. This work presents an open-source hardware-aware simulation framework for mixed-signal SNNs that enables comparative analysis across neuron, synapse and architecture choices. The framework supports multiple neuron models, including Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF), Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) and Axon-Hillock (AH), together with non-volatile analog synapses based on floating-gate transistors and ReRAM devices. By incorporating device-level nonlinearities directly into PyTorch-based training and inference, the tool enables optimization of physical synaptic parameters rather than idealized abstract weights. The framework is evaluated on standard neuromorphic benchmarks, including N-MNIST, DVS Gesture and Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD). For each model dataset configuration, it reports classification accuracy together with hardware-oriented metrics such as silicon area, power consumption and quantization sensitivity. These capabilities enable cross-layer design space exploration and help identify neuron-synapse configurations that best satisfy application-specific constraints on accuracy, energy efficiency, area and hardware fidelity.

We propose EdgeSpike, a co-designed spiking neural network (SNN) framework for autonomous low-power sensing in edge Internet of Things (IoT) architectures. EdgeSpike unifies (i) a hybrid surrogate-gradient and direct-encoding training pipeline, (ii) a hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) bounded by per-inference energy and memory budgets, (iii) an event-driven runtime targeting Intel Loihi 2, SpiNNaker 2, and commodity ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers with custom spike-sparse SIMD kernels, and (iv) a lightweight local plasticity rule enabling continual on-device adaptation without backpropagation. The framework is evaluated across five sensing tasks (keyword spotting, vibration-based machine fault detection, surface electromyography gesture recognition, 77 GHz radar human-activity classification, and structural-health acoustic-emission monitoring) on three hardware targets. EdgeSpike achieves a mean classification accuracy of 91.4%, within 1.2 percentage points (pp) of strong INT8 convolutional neural network (CNN) baselines (mean 92.6%), while reducing energy per inference by 18x to 47x on neuromorphic hardware (mean 31x) and by 4.6x to 7.9x on Cortex-M (mean 6.1x). End-to-end latency remains at or below 9.4 ms across all 15 task-hardware configurations. A seven-month, 64-node wireless field deployment confirms a 6.3x extension in projected battery lifetime (from 312 to 1978 days at 2 Wh per node) and bounded accuracy degradation under seasonal drift (0.7 pp with on-device adaptation versus 2.1 pp without). Hardware-aware NAS evaluates 8400 candidates and yields a 12-point Pareto front. EdgeSpike will be released as open source with reproducible training pipelines, hardware-portable runtimes, and benchmark suites.