Highly-Adaptive Mixed-Precision MAC Unit for Smart and Low-Power Edge Computing - LIRMM - Laboratoire d’Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier
Conference Papers Year : 2021

Highly-Adaptive Mixed-Precision MAC Unit for Smart and Low-Power Edge Computing

Guillaume Devic
Maxime France-Pillois
Gilles Sassatelli
Abdoulaye Gamatié

Abstract

Machine learning algorithms are compute-and memory-intensive. Their execution at the edge on resourceconstrained embedded systems is challenging. Data quantization, i.e. data bit-width reduction, contributes to reducing de-facto the memory bandwidth requirement. In order to best exploit this bit-width reduction, a prevailing approach consists of tailored hardware accelerators. Another approach relies on generalpurpose compute units with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) support for reduced data bit-width precision, as in ARM Cortex-M [1] or RISC-V based RI5CY [2] processors. However, such processors only handle a few predefined bit-width ranges, e.g. 8-bit and 16-bit only for the ARM SIMD. This paper proposes a flexible architecture of Multiply-and-Accumulate (MAC) unit allowing asymmetric multiplication for operand sizes in powers of 2, up to 32 bits. The synthesis of this architecture in 28nm FD-SOI technology shows 10% and 25% reduction in area and dynamic power respectively, compared to the RI5CY MAC unit. From the energy-efficiency point of view, up to 50% improvements are achieved.
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Dates and versions

lirmm-03241639 , version 1 (28-05-2021)

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Guillaume Devic, Maxime France-Pillois, Jérémie Salles, Gilles Sassatelli, Abdoulaye Gamatié. Highly-Adaptive Mixed-Precision MAC Unit for Smart and Low-Power Edge Computing. NEWCAS 2021 - 19th IEEE International New Circuits and Systems Conference, Jun 2021, Toulon (virtual), France. pp.1-4, ⟨10.1109/NEWCAS50681.2021.9462745⟩. ⟨lirmm-03241639⟩
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