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Fast and Accurate Deep Reconfigurable Spiking Inference Accelerator Architecture (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Nov 1, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A design approach that tunes the network and the chip together turns ordinary trained image recognizers into low-precision spiking versions that only compute when signals arrive. The converted ResNet-18 and VGG-11 stayed within 1% of the original accuracy in just a few quick steps.

Abstract · Hardware-Software Co-optimised Fast and Accurate Deep Reconfigurable Spiking Inference Accelerator Architecture Design Methodology

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising approach to improve the energy efficiency of machine learning models, as they naturally implement event-driven computations while avoiding expensive multiplication operations. In this paper, we develop a hardware-software co-optimisation strategy to port software-trained deep neural networks (DNN) to reduced-precision spiking models demonstrating fast and accurate inference in a novel event-driven CMOS reconfigurable spiking inference accelerator. Experimental results show that a reduced-precision Resnet-18 and VGG-11 SNN models achieves classification accuracy within 1% of the baseline full-precision DNN model within 8 spike timesteps. We also demonstrate an FPGA prototype implementation of the spiking inference accelerator with a throughput of 38.4 giga operations per second (GOPS) consuming 1.54 Watts on PYNQ-Z2 FPGA. This corresponds to 0.6 GOPS per processing element and 2.25,GOPS/DSP slice, which is 2x and 4.5x higher utilisation efficiency respectively compared to the state-of-the-art. Our co-optimisation strategy can be employed to develop deep reduced precision SNN models and port them to resource-efficient event-driven hardware accelerators for edge applications.

Anagha Nimbekar, Prabodh Katti, Chen Li, Bashir M. Al-Hashimi, Amit Acharyya, Bipin Rajendran
arXiv:2410.16298 · cs.NE · submitted Oct 7, 2024 · updated Oct 30, 2024
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