A power efficiency enhancements of a multi-bit accelerator for memory prohibitive deep neural networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are widely employed in the contemporary artificial intelligence systems. However these models have millions of connections between the layers, that are both memory prohibitive and computationally expensive. Employing these models on an embedded mobile application is resource limited with high power consumption and significant bandwidth requirement to access the data from the off-chip DRAM. Reducing the data movement between the on-chip and off-chip DRAM is the main criteria to achieve high throughput and overall better energy efficiency. Our proposed multi-bit accelerator achieves these goals by employing the truncation of the partial sum (Psum) results of the preceding layer before feeding it into the next layer. We exhibit the architecture by inferencing 32-bits for the first convolution layers and sequentially truncate the bits on the MSB/LSB of integer and fractional part without any further training on the original network. At the last fully connected layer, the top-1 accuracy is maintained with the reduced bit width of 14 and top-5 accuracy upto 10-bit width. The computation engine consists of an systolic array of 1024 processing elements (PE). Large CNNs such as AlexNet, MobileNet, SqueezeNet and EfficientNet were used as benchmark CNN model and Virtex Ultrascale FPGA was used to test the architecture. The proposed truncation scheme has 49% power reduction and resource utilization was reduced by 73.25% for LUTs (Look-up tables), 68.76% for FFs (Flip-Flops), 74.60% for BRAMs (Block RAMs) and 79.425% for Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) when compared with the 32 bits architecture. The design achieves a performance of 223.69 GOPS on a Virtex Ultrascale FPGA, the design has a overall gain of 3.63 × throughput when compared to other prior FPGA accelerators. In addition, the overall power consumption is 4.5 × lower when compared to other prior architectures. The ASIC version of the accelerator was designed in 22nm FDSOI CMOS process to achieve a overall throughput of 2.03 TOPS/W with a total power consumption of 791 mW and with a area of 1 mm ×, 1.2 mm. © 2020 IEEE.