IECA: An In-Execution Configuration CNN Accelerator With 30.55 GOPS/mm(2) Area EfficiencyShow others and affiliations
2021 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Part 1: Regular Papers, ISSN 1549-8328, E-ISSN 1558-0806, Vol. 68, no 11, p. 4672-4685Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
It remains challenging for a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerator to maintain high hardware utilization and low processing latency with restricted on-chip memory. This paper presents an In-Execution Configuration Accelerator (IECA) that realizes an efficient control scheme, exploring architectural data reuse, unified in-execution controlling, and pipelined latency hiding to minimize configuration overhead out of the computation scope. The proposed IECA achieves row-wise convolution with tiny distributed buffers and reduces the size of total on-chip memory by removing 40% of redundant memory storage with shared delay chains. By exploiting a reconfigurable Sequence Mapping Table (SMT) and Finite State Machine (FSM) control, the chip realizes cycle-accurate Processing Element (PE) control, automatic loop tiling and latency hiding without extra time slots for pre-configuration. Evaluated on AlexNet and VGG-16, the IECA retains over 97.3% PE utilization and over 95.6% memory access time hiding on average. The chip is designed and fabricated in a UMC 55-nm process running at a frequency of 250 MHz and achieves an area efficiency of 30.55 GOPS/mm(2) and 0.244 GOPS/KGE (kilo-gate-equivalent), which makes an over 2.0x and 2.1x improvement, respectively, compared with that of previous related works. Implementation of the IEC control scheme uses only a 0.55% area of the 2.75 mm(2) core.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2021. Vol. 68, no 11, p. 4672-4685
Keywords [en]
Convolutional neural network (CNN), area-efficient, accelerator, in-execution configuration
National Category
Computer Engineering
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-305370DOI: 10.1109/TCSI.2021.3108762ISI: 000716698600026Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85119498618OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-305370DiVA, id: diva2:1616524
Note
QC 20211203
2021-12-032021-12-032022-10-24Bibliographically approved