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A Fine-Grained Sparse Accelerator for Multi-Precision DNN

Neural Networks (NNs) have made a significant breakthrough in many fields, while they also pose a great challenge to hardware platforms since the state-of-the-art neural networks are both communicational- and computational-intensive. Researchers proposed model compression algorithms using sparsification and quantization, along with specific hardware architecture designs, to accelerate various applications. However, the irregularity of memory access caused by the sparsity severely damages the regularity of intensive computation loops. Therefore, the architecture design for sparse neural networks is crucial to better software and hardware co-design for neural network applications. To face these challenges, this paper first analyzes the computation patterns of different NN structures and unify them into the form of sparse matrix-vector multiplication, sparse matrix-matrix multiplication, and element-wise multiplication. On the basis of the EIE which supports only the fully-connected network and recurrent neural network (RNN), we expand it to support the convolution neural network (CNN) using the input vector transform unit. This paper designs a multi-precision multiplier with supporting datapath, which makes the proposed architecture have a better acceleration effect in the low-bit quantization with the same hardware architecture. The proposed accelerator architecture can achieve the equivalent performance and energy efficiency up to 574.2 GOPS, 42.8 GOPS/W for CNN and 110.4 GOPS, 8.24 GOPS/W for RNN under 4-bit quantization on Xilinx XCKU115 FPGA running at 200MHz. And it is the state-of-the-art accelerator supporting CNN-RNN-based models like the long-term recurrent convolutional network with 571.1 GOPS performance and 42.6 GOPS/W energy efficiency under 4-bit data format.