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  4. Keep All in Memory with Maxwell: a Near-SRAM Computing Architecture for Edge AI Applications
 
conference paper

Keep All in Memory with Maxwell: a Near-SRAM Computing Architecture for Edge AI Applications

Eggermann, Grégoire Axel  
•
Ansaloni, Giovanni  
•
Atienza Alonso, David  
April 25, 2025
2025 26th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED) [Forthcoming publication]
The 26th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design

Recent advances in machine learning have dramatically increased model size and computational requirements, increasingly straining computing system capabilities. This tension is particularly acute for resource-constrained edge scenarios, for which careful hardware acceleration of computing-intensive patterns and the optimization of data reuse to limit costly data transfers are key. Addressing these challenges, we herein present a novel compute-memory architecture named Maxwell, which supports the execution of entire inference algorithms nearmemory. Leveraging the regular structure of memory arrays, Maxwell achieves a high degree of parallelization for both convolutional (CONV) and fully connected (FC) layers, while supporting fine-grained quantization. Additionally, the architecture effectively minimizes data movements by performing nearmemory all intermediate computations, such as scaling, quantization, activation functions, and pooling layers. We demonstrate that such an approach leads to up to 8.5x speed-ups, with respect to state-of-the-art near-memory architectures that require the transfer of data at the boundaries of CONV and/or FC layers. Accelerations of up to 250x with respect to software execution are observed on an edge platform that integrates Maxwell logic and a 32-bit RISC-V core, with Maxwell-specific components only accounting for 10.6% of the memory area.

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Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Eggermann, Grégoire Axel  

EPFL

Ansaloni, Giovanni  

EPFL

Atienza Alonso, David  

EPFL

Date Issued

2025-04-25

Publisher

IEEE

Published in
2025 26th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED) [Forthcoming publication]
Subjects

Near-memory computing

•

Edge computing

•

CNN inference

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
ESL  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
The 26th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design

ISQED 2025

San Francisco, CA, US

2025-04-23 - 2025-04-25

FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

Swiss National Science Foundation

Edge-Companions: Hardware/Software Co-Optimization Toward EnergyMinimal Health Monitoring at the Edge

10.002.812

State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation

Available on Infoscience
February 12, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/246884
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