Deep neural network (DNN) accelerators with improved energy and delay are desirable for meeting the requirements of hardware targeted for IoT and edge computing systems. Convolutional neural networks (CoNNs) belong to one of the most popular types of DNN architectures. is paper presents the design and evaluation of an accelerator for CoNNs. e system-level architecture is based on mixed-signal, cellular neural networks (CeNNs). Speci cally, we present (i) the implementation of di erent layers, including convolution, ReLU, and pooling, in a CoNN using CeNN, (ii) modi ed CoNN structures with CeNN-friendly layers to reduce computational overheads typically associated with a CoNN, (iii) a mixed-signal CeNN architecture that performs CoNN computations in the analog and mixed signal domain, and (iv) design space exploration that identi es what CeNN-based algorithm and architectural features fare best compared to existing algorithms and architectures when evaluated over common datasets -MNIST and CIFAR-10. Notably, the proposed approach can lead to 8.7× improvements in energy-delay product (EDP) per digit classi cation for the MNIST dataset at iso-accuracy when compared with the state-of-the-art DNN engine, while our approach could o er 4.3× improvements in EDP when compared to other network implementations for the CIFAR-10 dataset.When considering application-speci c hardware to support neural networks, it is important that said hardware can implement networks that can be extensible to a large class of networks, and solve a large collection of application-level problems. Deep neural networks (DNNs) represent a class of such networks and have demonstrated their strength in applications such as playing the game of Go [54], image and video analysis [32], target tracking [31], etc. In this paper, we use convolutional neural network (CoNN) as a case study for DNNs due to its general prevalence. CoNNs are computationally intensive, which could lead to high latency and energy for inference and even higher latency/energy for training. e focus of this paper is on developing a low energy/delay mixed-signal system based on cellular neural networks (CeNNs) for realizing CoNN.A Cellular Nonlinear/Neural Network (CeNN) is an analog computing architecture [11] that could be well suited for many information processing tasks. In a CeNN, identical processing units (called cells) process analog information in a concurrent manner. Interconnection between cells is typically local (i.e., nearest neighbor) and space-invariant. For spatio-temporal applications, CeNNs can o er vastly superior performance and power e ciency when compared to conventional von Neumann architectures [47,61]. Using "CeNNs for CoNN" allows the bulk of the computation associated with a CoNN to be performed in the analog domain. Sensed information could immediately be processed with no analog-to-digital conversion (ADC). Also, inference-based processing tasks can tolerate lower precision (e.g., Google's TPU employs 8-bit integer matrix multiplies [24]) typically associa...
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