SparrowSNN: A Hardware/software Co-design for Energy Efficient ECG Classification

Deep learning has driven significant technological advancements, but its high energy consumption limits its use on battery-operated edge devices. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer promising reductions in inference-time energy consumption. However, existing neuromorphic architectures optimize scalable, many-core NoC execution, suited to large models but mismatched to edge devices, and their prevalent integrate-and-fire neurons re-read weights across (T) timesteps, inflating data-movement and dynamic-control energy. To address this challenge, we propose SparrowSNN, an optimized end-to-end design tailored for edge applications. SparrowSNN proposes: (1) a hardware-friendly spike activation function SSF (Sum-Spike-and-Fire); (2) a customizable μW-level-power quantized hybrid ANN-SNN model that can be designed per application; (3) a compact and low-power reconfigurable ASIC architecture, supporting the aforementioned designs. Evaluated on biomedical MIT-BIH ECG and DEAP EEG datasets, SparrowSNN achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with 20× to 100× lower energy consumption, significantly outperforming existing ultra-low power solutions.