A Low-Power Hardware Architecture for Real-Time CNN Computing
Convolutional neural network (CNN) is widely deployed on edge devices, performing tasks such as objective detection, image recognition and acoustic recognition. However, the limited resources and strict power constraints of edge devices pose a great challenge to applying the computationally intensiv...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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MDPI AG
2023-02-01
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| Series: | Sensors |
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| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/4/2045 |
| _version_ | 1797618295449321472 |
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| author | Xinyu Liu Chenhong Cao Shengyu Duan |
| author_facet | Xinyu Liu Chenhong Cao Shengyu Duan |
| author_sort | Xinyu Liu |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Convolutional neural network (CNN) is widely deployed on edge devices, performing tasks such as objective detection, image recognition and acoustic recognition. However, the limited resources and strict power constraints of edge devices pose a great challenge to applying the computationally intensive CNN models. In addition, for the edge applications with real-time requirements, such as real-time computing (RTC) systems, the computations need to be completed considering the required timing constraint, so it is more difficult to trade off between computational latency and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a low-power CNN accelerator for edge inference of RTC systems, where the computations are operated in a column-wise manner, to realize an immediate computation for the currently available input data. We observe that most computations of some CNN kernels in deep layers can be completed in multiple cycles, while not affecting the overall computational latency. Thus, we present a multi-cycle scheme to conduct the column-wise convolutional operations to reduce the hardware resource and power consumption. We present hardware architecture for the multi-cycle scheme as a domain-specific CNN architecture, which is then implemented in a 65 nm technology. We prove our proposed approach realizes up to 8.45%, 49.41% and 50.64% power reductions for LeNet, AlexNet and VGG16, respectively. The experimental results show that our approach tends to cause a larger power reduction for the CNN models with greater depth, larger kernels and more channels. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-11T08:11:05Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-a8f4ae2be03b40148d29c0c51af15bc5 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1424-8220 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-11T08:11:05Z |
| publishDate | 2023-02-01 |
| publisher | MDPI AG |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Sensors |
| spelling | doaj.art-a8f4ae2be03b40148d29c0c51af15bc52023-11-16T23:09:35ZengMDPI AGSensors1424-82202023-02-01234204510.3390/s23042045A Low-Power Hardware Architecture for Real-Time CNN ComputingXinyu Liu0Chenhong Cao1Shengyu Duan2School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, ChinaSchool of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, ChinaSchool of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, ChinaConvolutional neural network (CNN) is widely deployed on edge devices, performing tasks such as objective detection, image recognition and acoustic recognition. However, the limited resources and strict power constraints of edge devices pose a great challenge to applying the computationally intensive CNN models. In addition, for the edge applications with real-time requirements, such as real-time computing (RTC) systems, the computations need to be completed considering the required timing constraint, so it is more difficult to trade off between computational latency and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a low-power CNN accelerator for edge inference of RTC systems, where the computations are operated in a column-wise manner, to realize an immediate computation for the currently available input data. We observe that most computations of some CNN kernels in deep layers can be completed in multiple cycles, while not affecting the overall computational latency. Thus, we present a multi-cycle scheme to conduct the column-wise convolutional operations to reduce the hardware resource and power consumption. We present hardware architecture for the multi-cycle scheme as a domain-specific CNN architecture, which is then implemented in a 65 nm technology. We prove our proposed approach realizes up to 8.45%, 49.41% and 50.64% power reductions for LeNet, AlexNet and VGG16, respectively. The experimental results show that our approach tends to cause a larger power reduction for the CNN models with greater depth, larger kernels and more channels.https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/4/2045CNNhardware accelerationedge computingRTC |
| spellingShingle | Xinyu Liu Chenhong Cao Shengyu Duan A Low-Power Hardware Architecture for Real-Time CNN Computing Sensors CNN hardware acceleration edge computing RTC |
| title | A Low-Power Hardware Architecture for Real-Time CNN Computing |
| title_full | A Low-Power Hardware Architecture for Real-Time CNN Computing |
| title_fullStr | A Low-Power Hardware Architecture for Real-Time CNN Computing |
| title_full_unstemmed | A Low-Power Hardware Architecture for Real-Time CNN Computing |
| title_short | A Low-Power Hardware Architecture for Real-Time CNN Computing |
| title_sort | low power hardware architecture for real time cnn computing |
| topic | CNN hardware acceleration edge computing RTC |
| url | https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/4/2045 |
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