Hardware Acceleration of a Generalized Fast 2-D Convolution Method for Deep Neural Networks

The hardware acceleration of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) is a highly effective and viable solution for running them on mobile devices. The power of DNNs is now available at the edge in a compact and power-efficient form factor with the aid of hardware acceleration. In this paper, we introduce an architecture that uses a generalized method called Single Partial Product 2-Dimensional Convolution (SPP2D Convolution) which calculates a 2-D convolution in a fast and expedient manner. We demonstrate that the SPP2D architecture prevents the re-fetching of input weights for the calculation of partial products, and it can calculate the output of any input size and kernel with low latency and high throughput compared to other popular techniques. SPP2D based architecture can reduce the memory access and execution time related to input reuse by at least
three
times in comparison with the work done in Ardakani
et al.
(2018) and approximately
nine
times that of the standard sliding window approach. We have implemented the generalized SPP2D architecture on the Xilinx KC705 Kintex-7 evaluation board to illustrate that the new SPP2D algorithm is well-suited for the hardware acceleration of DNNs. We implemented LeNet-5 and VGGNet-16 using the SPP2D architecture. We demonstrate that the SPP2D based LeNet-5 has a high throughput of
5 GOP/s
and
14.8 GOP/s/W
and
42 GOP/s/W
for the convolution operation using the SPP2D IP. Our LeNet-5 design achieves a similar throughput to Zhou and Jiang (2015) however using
$\mathbf {3.3}\times $
fewer DSPs and an even smaller memory and lookup table (LUT) footprint. The SPP2D based VGGNet-16 network has a latency of
91.3 ms
which is
79%,97%, 17%
and
95%
less than contemporary designs respectively, while running at a low power of
298 mW
which is similar to the power level of these designs. The total processing time of our design with a parallelism factor of nine is
3.93
secs and it is
70%
less than that in Ardakani
et al.
(2018) and
24%
less than that in Panchbhaiyye and Ogunfunmi (2021). The SPP2D based LeNet-5 and VGGNet-16 accelerators provide a low-latency design with reduced memory access thus leading to a low-power design. As a result, SPP2D convolution is very well suited for hardware acceleration of DNNs.