OscNet v1.5: Energy Efficient Hopfield Network on CMOS Oscillators for Image Classification

Machine learning has achieved remarkable advancements but at the cost of significant computational resources. This has created an urgent need for a novel and energy-efficient computational fabric and corresponding algorithms. CMOS Oscillator Networks (OscNet) is a brain inspired and specially designed hardware for low energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a Hopfield Network based machine learning algorithm that can be implemented on OscNet. The network is trained using forward propagation alone to learn sparsely connected weights, yet achieves an 8% improvement in accuracy compared to conventional deep learning models on MNIST dataset. OscNet v1.5 achieves competitive accuracy on MNIST and is well-suited for implementation using CMOS-compatible ring oscillator arrays with SHIL. In oscillator-based inference, we utilize only 24% of the connections used in a fully connected Hopfield network, with merely a 0.1% drop in accuracy. OscNet v1.5 relies solely on forward propagation and employs sparse connections, making it an energy-efficient machine learning pipeline designed for oscillator computing fabric. The repository for OscNet family is: https://github.com/RussRobin/OscNet .

Wenxiao Cai, Zongru Li, Iris Wang, Yu-Neng Wang, Thomas H. Lee · 2025