Digital Neuron: A Hardware Inference Accelerator for Convolutional Deep Neural Networks

Abstract: We propose a Digital Neuron, a hardware inference accelerator for convolutional deep neural networks with integer inputs and integer weights for embedded systems. The main idea to reduce circuit area and power consumption is manipulating dot products between input feature and weight vectors by Barrel shifters and parallel adders. The reduced area allows the more computational engines to be mounted on an inference accelerator, resulting in high throughput compared to prior HW accelerators. We verified that the multiplication of integer numbers with 3-partial sub-integers does not cause significant loss of inference accuracy compared to 32-bit floating point calculation. The proposed digital neuron can perform 800 MAC operations in one clock for computation for convolution as well as full-connection. This paper provides a scheme that reuses input, weight, and output of all layers to reduce DRAM access. In addition, this paper proposes a configurable architecture that can provide inference of adaptable feature of convolutional neural networks. The throughput in terms of Watt of the digital neuron is achieved 754.7 GMACs/W.