As a key ingredient of deep neural networks (DNNs), fully-connected (FC) layers are widely used in various artificial intelligence applications. However, there are many parameters in FC layers, so the efficient process of FC layers is restricted by memory bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a compression approach combining block-circulant matrix-based weight representation and power-of-two quantization. Applying block-circulant matrices in FC layers can reduce the storage complexity from O ( k 2 ) to O ( k ) . By quantizing the weights into integer powers of two, the multiplications in the reference can be replaced by shift and add operations. The memory usages of models for MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet can be compressed by 171 × , 2731 × and 128 × with minimal accuracy loss, respectively. A configurable parallel hardware architecture is then proposed for processing the compressed FC layers efficiently. Without multipliers, a block matrix-vector multiplication module (B-MV) is used as the computing kernel. The architecture is flexible to support FC layers of various compression ratios with small footprint. Simultaneously, the memory access can be significantly reduced by using the configurable architecture. Measurement results show that the accelerator has a processing power of 409.6 GOPS, and achieves 5.3 TOPS/W energy efficiency at 800 MHz.

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