CANET: Quantized Neural Network Inference With 8-bit Carry-Aware Accumulator

Neural network quantization represents weights and activations with few bits, greatly reducing the overhead of multiplications. However, due to the recursive accumulation operations, high-precision accumulators are still required in multiply-accumulate (MAC) units to avoid overflow, incurring significant computational overhead. This constraint limits the efficient deployment of quantized NNs on resource-constrained platforms. To address this problem, we present a novel framework named CANET, which adapts the 8-bit quantized model to execute MAC operations with 8-bit accumulators. CANET not only employs 8-bit carry-aware accumulators to represent overflow data correctly, but also adaptively learns the optimal format per layer to minimize truncation errors. Meanwhile, a weight-oriented reordering method is developed to reduce the transfer length of the carry. CANET is evaluated on three networks in the ImageNet classification task, where comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods is realized. Finally, we implement the proposed architecture on a custom hardware platform, demonstrating a reduction of 40% in power and 49% in area compared with the MAC unit with 32-bit accumulators.