A NoC-Based Spatial DNN Inference Accelerator With Memory-Friendly Dataflow

Editor’s notes: This article addresses the challenges of excessive storage overhead and the absence of sparsity-aware design in Network-on-Chip (NoC)-based spatial deep neural network accelerators. The authors present a prototype chip that outperforms existing accelerators in both energy and area efficiency, demonstrated on TSMC 28-nm process technology. —Mahdi Nikdast, Colorado State University, USA —Miquel Moreto, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain —Masoumeh (Azin) Ebrahimi, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden —Sujay Deb, IIIT Delhi, India