Rethinking the Designing of Convolution Engine for Reconfigurable CNN Accelerator Using Sparse-Based Design Scheme

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are evolving as they are applied to more diverse environments and more difficult challenges. The evolving induces various convolution modes (e.g., 1×1 convolution, 2-stride convolution and rectangle convolution) in current CNNs and makes it difficult for the hardware accelerators to efficiently support such various convolution modes. In this paper, it is found that an important difference of these convolution modes is the computation density. Therefore, the above convolution modes are regarded as structured sparse and claims that sparse-based design methodology can be applied for the implementation of the reconfigurable CNN accelerator. Subsequently, two critical architectural parameters, including input tile size and convolution engine (CE) scale, are evaluated based on Standard deviation of calculations (SDC), unsupported convolution mode (UCM) and unsuitable IFM size (UIS), DSP utilization ratio (DUR) as well as hardware resource overhead (HRO), respectively. With the aid of the optimal parameters, a high-parallelism and flexible CE array and a high-performance and reconfigurable CNN architecture are designed. The accelerator was implemented on a Xilinx VC709 FPGA and ran at a clock frequency of 300 MHz, achieving 921.60 to 1382.40 GOPS while supporting various convolution modes. Compared with previous dense-/sparse-based works, the proposed accelerator can realize 1.35× to 10.77× improvements on performance and 1.22× to 2.84× improvements on DSP efficiency while deploying VGG16.