DSA-CNN: an fpga-integrated deformable systolic array for convolutional neural network acceleration.

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly being explored for accelerating Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) due to their efficient energy consumption and robust performance. For low-power edge deployment, FPGA-based CNN accelerators typically adopt spatial unrolling architectures. These designs not only achieve high computational efficiency but also feature reduced latency between data transfer and storage access, with low power consumption. Nonetheless, these accelerators may not perform as well with convolutional layers that have large input sizes but few channels. The complexity involved in managing spatial unrolling can hinder their large-scale implementation in integrated circuits. To meet these challenges, this paper presents a new computing architecture called the Deformation Systolic Array (DSA). It starts by designing configurable processing elements (PEs). The architecture uses a designed feature pumping (F-P) method as its dataflow to minimize delays. Additionally, a data broadcasting approach is employed across PEs using a systolic array, enhancing data reuse. The scalable design allows adaptation to varying resource capacities and computational requirements. Furthermore, a scheduling policy has been developed that enables PEs to follow different parallel processing modes depending on the number of channels, size, and type of the convolutional layer. The evaluation experiments demonstrate that, compared to the NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU and the SIYUAN370 ASIC, DSA-CNN achieves that speedups of 2.10 × and 1.89 × , respectively, when deploying the lightweight object detection network SSD-MobileNetV1-300 on the VU13P. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]