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ElfCore: A 28nm Neural Processor Enabling Dynamic Structured Sparse Training and Online Self-Supervised Learning with Activity-Dependent Weight Update

Published: December 24, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2512.21153v1

By: Zhe Su, Giacomo Indiveri

Potential Business Impact:

Learns from senses with less power.

Business Areas:
DSP Hardware

In this paper, we present ElfCore, a 28nm digital spiking neural network processor tailored for event-driven sensory signal processing. ElfCore is the first to efficiently integrate: (1) a local online self-supervised learning engine that enables multi-layer temporal learning without labeled inputs; (2) a dynamic structured sparse training engine that supports high-accuracy sparse-to-sparse learning; and (3) an activity-dependent sparse weight update mechanism that selectively updates weights based solely on input activity and network dynamics. Demonstrated on tasks including gesture recognition, speech, and biomedical signal processing, ElfCore outperforms state-of-the-art solutions with up to 16X lower power consumption, 3.8X reduced on-chip memory requirements, and 5.9X greater network capacity efficiency.

Country of Origin
🇨🇭 Switzerland

Page Count
4 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Hardware Architecture