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The Design of Efficient Data Flow and Low-Complexity Architecture for a Highly Configurable CNN Accelerator

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Abstract

This paper presents a highly configurable and low-complexity CNN accelerator based on the MobileNetV3 model. To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first design of CNN accelerator based on the MobileNetV3 model. A highly efficient processing flow and memory-access scheme are proposed in this paper so that the throughput is greatly enhanced for the structural features in MobileNetV3 model. Furthermore, the proposed processing flow enhances the efficiency for the utilization of hardware components to reduce the complexity. Based on the proposed processing flow, this paper presents a highly configurable architecture to support various operation modes in MobileNetV3 model. The designed architecture is synthesized and layout with TSMC 90 nm technology. The evaluations for the performance and area complexity are conducted based on the post-layout estimations. It is shown in this paper that the performance of 197.7 FPS is achieved with the hardware complexity of 5392 KGEs for the MobileNetV3-Large. Compared to the state-of-the-art accelerator based on MobileNet, the FPS of the proposed design is improved by 3.4 × and the complexity is reduced by 18%.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This study is funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, MOST 110-2221-E-011-155, Chung-An Shen, MOST 111-2221-E-011-136-MY3, Chung-An Shen

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  1. Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hui-Wen Liu & Chung-An Shen

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  1. Hui-Wen Liu
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  2. Chung-An Shen
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Correspondence to Chung-An Shen.

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Liu, HW., Shen, CA. The Design of Efficient Data Flow and Low-Complexity Architecture for a Highly Configurable CNN Accelerator. Circuits Syst Signal Process 42, 4759–4783 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-023-02331-4

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