Optimal Architecture of Floating-Point Arithmetic for Neural Network Training Processors

The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the critical technologies in the recent fourth industrial revolution. The AIoT (Artificial Intelligence Internet of Things) is expected to be a solution that aids rapid and secure data processing. While the success of AIoT demanded low-power neural network processors, most of the recent research has been focused on accelerator designs only for inference. The growing interest in self-supervised and semi-supervised learning now calls for processors offloading the training process in addition to the inference process. Incorporating training with high accuracy goals requires the use of floating-point operators. The higher precision floating-point arithmetic architectures in neural networks tend to consume a large area and energy. Consequently, an energy-efficient/compact accelerator is required. The proposed architecture incorporates training in 32 bits, 24 bits, 16 bits, and mixed precisions to find the optimal floating-point format for low power and smaller-sized edge device. The proposed accelerator engines have been verified on FPGA for both inference and training of the MNIST image dataset. The combination of 24-bit custom FP format with 16-bit Brain FP has achieved an accuracy of more than 93%. ASIC implementation of this optimized mixed-precision accelerator using TSMC 65nm reveals an active area of 1.036 × 1.036 mm(2) and energy consumption of 4.445 µJ per training of one image. Compared with 32-bit architecture, the size and the energy are reduced by 4.7 and 3.91 times, respectively. Therefore, the CNN structure using floating-point numbers with an optimized data path will significantly contribute to developing the AIoT field that requires a small area, low energy, and high accuracy.