Bit-Line Computing for CNN Accelerators Co-Design in Edge AI Inference
By supporting the access of multiple memory words at the same time, Bit-line Computing (BC) architectures allow the parallel execution of bit-wise operations in-memory. At the array periphery, arithmetic operations are then derived with little additional overhead. Such a paradigm opens novel opportunities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the edge, thanks to the massive parallelism inherent in memory arrays and the extreme energy efficiency of computing in-situ, hence avoiding data transfers. Previous works have shown that BC brings disruptive efficiency gains when targeting AI workloads, a key metric in the context of emerging edge AI scenarios. This manuscript builds on these findings by proposing an end-to-end framework that leverages BC-specific optimizations to enable high parallelism and aggressive compression of AI models. Our approach is supported by a novel hardware module performing real-time decoding, as well as new algorithms to enable BC-friendly model compression. Our hardware/software approach results in a 91% energy savings (for a 1% accuracy degradation constraint) regarding state-of-the-art BC computing approaches.
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Rios, M., Ponzina, F., Levisse, A. S. J., Ansaloni, G., & Atienza Alonso, D. (2023). Bit-Line Computing for CNN Accelerators Co-Design in Edge AI Inference. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 11(2), 358–372. https://doi.org/10.1109/TETC.2023.3237914
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