SFATTI: Spiking FPGA Accelerator For Temporal Task-Driven Inference - a Case Study on Mnist
Alessio Caviglia, Filippo Marostica, Alessio Carpegna, Alessandro Savino, Stefano Di Carlo · 2025
Hardware accelerators are essential for achieving low-latency, energy-efficient inference in edge applications like image recognition. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are particularly promising due to their event-driven and temporally sparse nature, making them well-suited for low-power Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based deployment. This paper explores using the open-source Spiker+ framework to generate optimized SNNs accelerators for handwritten digit recognition on the MNIST dataset. Spiker+ enables high-level specification of network topologies, neuron models, and quantization, automatically generating deployable HDL. We evaluate multiple configurations and analyze trade-offs relevant to edge computing constraints.