Communication Synchronization-Aware Arbitration Policy in NoC-Based DNN Accelerators

In NoC-based neural network accelerators, many-to-one and many-to-many are prevalent traffic patterns. In these traffic patterns, there exists a need for communication synchronization between Processing Elements (PEs) of adjacent layers to optimize latency. The last received packet will determine the end time of a layer’s computation. The Communication Synchronization-aware Arbitration Policy (CSAP) is proposed in this brief to handle this problem, which uses a negative feedback mechanism to regulate the packet sending rate of each source node. Compared with the local-age-based policy, CSAP decreases the execution by 4.69% $\sim$ 12.55% across neural networks of different scales. The proposed policy only incurs 1.06% additional hardware overhead in the router compared with the local-age-based policy.