Journal of Xidian University

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Design of the programmable neural network processor based on the transport triggered architecture

ZHAO Boran;ZHANG Li;SHI Guangming;HUANG Rong;XU Xinran   

  1. (School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian Univ., Xian 710071, China)
  • Received:2017-10-11 Published:2018-09-25

Abstract:

The convolutional neural networks have the problems of structure diversity and large amounts of data exchange and computation. A transport triggered architecture based convolutional neural network processor is presented in this paper. The data transport network is constructed with multi-channel direct memory access channels, the multi-port memory and the specialized pooling data path, which solves the inefficient data exchange problem. Experimental results show that, although the proposed architecture is 11% slower than the streamline structure, it can adapt to a variety of convolutional neural networks and save 46.5% multipliers. Compared with the schemes presented in other papers except pipeline implementation, our design improves the data throughput rate by 40% at least. Besides, this system has advantages of parallel efficiency, programmable flexibility, online architecture reconfiguration, high processing speed, etc.

Key words: deep learning, convolutional neural networks, parallel computing, field programmable gate array