14.5 Eyeriss: An energy-efficient reconfigurable accelerator for deep convolutional neural networks

Deep learning using convolutional neural networks (CNN) gives state-of-the-art accuracy on many computer vision tasks (e.g. object detection, recognition, segmentation). Convolutions account for over 90% of the processing in CNNs for both inference/testing and training, and fully convolutional networks are increasingly being used. To achieve state-of-the-art accuracy requires CNNs with not only a larger number of layers, but also millions of filters weights, and varying shapes (i.e. filter sizes, number of filters, number of channels) as shown in Fig. 14.5.1. For instance, AlexNet [1] uses 2.3 million weights (4.6MB of storage) and requires 666 million MACs per 227×227 image (13kMACs/pixel). VGG16 [2] uses 14.7 million weights (29.4MB of storage) and requires 15.3 billion MACs per 224×224 image (306kMACs/pixel). The large number of filter weights and channels results in substantial data movement, which consumes significant energy.