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© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Convolutional neural networks have been widely applied in the field of computer vision. In convolutional neural networks, convolution operations account for more than 90% of the total computational workload. The current mainstream approach to achieving high energy-efficient convolution operations is through dedicated hardware accelerators. Convolution operations involve a significant amount of weights and input feature data. Due to limited on-chip cache space in accelerators, there is a significant amount of off-chip DRAM memory access involved in the computation process. The latency of DRAM access is 20 times higher than that of SRAM, and the energy consumption of DRAM access is 100 times higher than that of multiply–accumulate (MAC) units. It is evident that the “memory wall” and “power wall” issues in neural network computation remain challenging. This paper presents the design of a hardware accelerator for convolutional neural networks. It employs a dataflow optimization strategy based on on-chip data reordering. This strategy improves on-chip data utilization and reduces the frequency of data exchanges between on-chip cache and off-chip DRAM. The experimental results indicate that compared to the accelerator without this strategy, it can reduce data exchange frequency by up to 82.9%.

Details

Title
Design of a Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on On-Chip Data Reordering
Author
Liu, Yang 1 ; Zhang, Yiheng 2 ; Hao, Xiaoran 2 ; Chen, Lan 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Ni, Mao 2 ; Chen, Ming 2 ; Chen, Rong 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China; [email protected] (Y.L.); [email protected] (Y.Z.); [email protected] (M.N.); [email protected] (M.C.); [email protected] (R.C.); University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China 
 Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China; [email protected] (Y.L.); [email protected] (Y.Z.); [email protected] (M.N.); [email protected] (M.C.); [email protected] (R.C.) 
First page
975
Publication year
2024
Publication date
2024
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20799292
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2955514367
Copyright
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.