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Neural Network-Hardware Co-Design for Scalable RRAM-Based BNN Accelerators (arxiv.org)
1 point by godelmachine on Nov 7, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The design splits the input so each smaller network fits on one resistive-memory chip, letting each chip finish a full 1-bit answer alone. That removes the analog-to-digital converters usually needed to combine partial results, losing under 1.1% accuracy on CIFAR-10 versus the original network.

Abstract · Neural Network-Hardware Co-design for Scalable RRAM-based BNN Accelerators

Recently, RRAM-based Binary Neural Network (BNN) hardware has been gaining interests as it requires 1-bit sense-amp only and eliminates the need for high-resolution ADC and DAC. However, RRAM-based BNN hardware still requires high-resolution ADC for partial sum calculation to implement large-scale neural network using multiple memory arrays. We propose a neural network-hardware co-design approach to split input to fit each split network on a RRAM array so that the reconstructed BNNs calculate 1-bit output neuron in each array. As a result, ADC can be completely eliminated from the design even for large-scale neural network. Simulation results show that the proposed network reconstruction and retraining recovers the inference accuracy of the original BNN. The accuracy loss of the proposed scheme in the CIFAR-10 testcase was less than 1.1% compared to the original network. The code for training and running proposed BNN models is available at: https://github.com/YulhwaKim/RRAMScalable_BNN.

Yulhwa Kim, Hyungjun Kim, Jae-Joon Kim
arXiv:1811.02187 · cs.NE, cs.ET · submitted Nov 6, 2018 · updated Apr 15, 2019
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