Hardware Design for Machine Learning

Things like growing volumes and varieties of available data, cheaper and more powerful computational processing, data storage and large-value predictions that can guide better decisions and smart actions in real time without human intervention are playing critical role in this age. All of these require models that can automatically analyse large complex data and deliver quick accurate results – even on a very large scale. Machine learning plays a significant role in developing these models. The applications of machine learning range from speech and object recognition to analysis and prediction of finance markets. Artificial Neural Network is one of the important algorithms of machine learning that is inspired by the structure and functional aspects of the biological neural networks. In this paper, we discuss the purpose, representation and classification methods for developing hardware for machine learning with the main focus on neural networks. This paper also presents the requirements, design issues and optimization techniques for building hardware architecture of neural networks.