Computational Analysis of stochastic arithmetic computing and stochastic activation function

Abstract

Stochastic Number Generators (SNG) plays a significant role in designing a stochastic computing system. SNGs make the stochastic system comfortable for computing in the stochastic domain. The challenges in developing the stochastic computing system are correlation and hardware area occupancy. By considering these phenomena, we have considered Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) based SNG and S-box based SNG in this work. Our contributions to this paper are stochastic computation for activation functions using the SNGs mentioned above and stochastic computation for arithmetic components in the stochastic domain. By considering the two SNG methods, the difference in the computation for accuracy has been analyzed for stochastic activation function and stochastic arithmetic computation. The better SNG method will be used as SNG for stochastic convolutional neural network design using this analysis.