2,084 research outputs found
Dynamic Power Management for Neuromorphic Many-Core Systems
This work presents a dynamic power management architecture for neuromorphic
many core systems such as SpiNNaker. A fast dynamic voltage and frequency
scaling (DVFS) technique is presented which allows the processing elements (PE)
to change their supply voltage and clock frequency individually and
autonomously within less than 100 ns. This is employed by the neuromorphic
simulation software flow, which defines the performance level (PL) of the PE
based on the actual workload within each simulation cycle. A test chip in 28 nm
SLP CMOS technology has been implemented. It includes 4 PEs which can be scaled
from 0.7 V to 1.0 V with frequencies from 125 MHz to 500 MHz at three distinct
PLs. By measurement of three neuromorphic benchmarks it is shown that the total
PE power consumption can be reduced by 75%, with 80% baseline power reduction
and a 50% reduction of energy per neuron and synapse computation, all while
maintaining temporary peak system performance to achieve biological real-time
operation of the system. A numerical model of this power management model is
derived which allows DVFS architecture exploration for neuromorphics. The
proposed technique is to be used for the second generation SpiNNaker
neuromorphic many core system
Motion estimation and CABAC VLSI co-processors for real-time high-quality H.264/AVC video coding
Real-time and high-quality video coding is gaining a wide interest in the research and industrial community for different applications. H.264/AVC, a recent standard for high performance video coding, can be successfully exploited in several scenarios including digital video broadcasting, high-definition TV and DVD-based systems, which require to sustain up to tens of Mbits/s. To that purpose this paper proposes optimized architectures for H.264/AVC most critical tasks, Motion estimation and context adaptive binary arithmetic coding. Post synthesis results on sub-micron CMOS standard-cells technologies show that the proposed architectures can actually process in real-time 720 Ă— 480 video sequences at 30 frames/s and grant more than 50 Mbits/s. The achieved circuit complexity and power consumption budgets are suitable for their integration in complex VLSI multimedia systems based either on AHB bus centric on-chip communication system or on novel Network-on-Chip (NoC) infrastructures for MPSoC (Multi-Processor System on Chip
Scalable and Low Power LDPC Decoder Design Using High Level Algorithmic Synthesis
This paper presents a scalable and low power low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoder design for the next generation wireless handset SoC. The methodology is based on high level synthesis: PICO (program-in chip-out) tool was used to produce efficient RTL directly from a sequential untimed C algorithm. We propose two parallel LDPC decoder architectures: (1) per-layer decoding architecture with scalable parallelism, and (2) multi-layer pipelined decoding architecture to achieve higher throughput. Based on the PICO technology, we have implemented a two-layer pipelined decoder on a TSMC 65nm 0.9V 8-metal layer CMOS technology with a core area of 1.2 mm2. The maximum achievable throughput is 415 Mbps when operating at 400 MHz clock frequency and the estimated peak power consumption is 180 mW.NokiaNokia Siemens Networks (NSN)XilinxNational Science Foundatio
NullHop: A Flexible Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on Sparse Representations of Feature Maps
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become the dominant neural network
architecture for solving many state-of-the-art (SOA) visual processing tasks.
Even though Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are most often used in training
and deploying CNNs, their power efficiency is less than 10 GOp/s/W for
single-frame runtime inference. We propose a flexible and efficient CNN
accelerator architecture called NullHop that implements SOA CNNs useful for
low-power and low-latency application scenarios. NullHop exploits the sparsity
of neuron activations in CNNs to accelerate the computation and reduce memory
requirements. The flexible architecture allows high utilization of available
computing resources across kernel sizes ranging from 1x1 to 7x7. NullHop can
process up to 128 input and 128 output feature maps per layer in a single pass.
We implemented the proposed architecture on a Xilinx Zynq FPGA platform and
present results showing how our implementation reduces external memory
transfers and compute time in five different CNNs ranging from small ones up to
the widely known large VGG16 and VGG19 CNNs. Post-synthesis simulations using
Mentor Modelsim in a 28nm process with a clock frequency of 500 MHz show that
the VGG19 network achieves over 450 GOp/s. By exploiting sparsity, NullHop
achieves an efficiency of 368%, maintains over 98% utilization of the MAC
units, and achieves a power efficiency of over 3TOp/s/W in a core area of
6.3mm. As further proof of NullHop's usability, we interfaced its FPGA
implementation with a neuromorphic event camera for real time interactive
demonstrations
A 6 mW, 5,000-Word Real-Time Speech Recognizer Using WFST Models
We describe an IC that provides a local speech recognition capability for a variety of electronic devices. We start with a generic speech decoder architecture that is programmable with industry-standard WFST and GMM speech models. Algorithm and architectural enhancements are incorporated in order to achieve real-time performance amid system-level constraints on internal memory size and external memory bandwidth. A 2.5 Ă— 2.5 mm test chip implementing this architecture was fabricated using a 65 nm process. The chip performs a 5,000 word recognition task in real-time with 13.0% word error rate, 6.0 mW core power consumption, and a search efficiency of approximately 16 nJ per hypothesis.Quanta Computer (Firm)Irwin Mark Jacobs and Joan Klein Jacobs Presidential Fellowshi
Evaluation of commercial ADC radiation tolerance for accelerator experiments
Electronic components used in high energy physics experiments are subjected
to a radiation background composed of high energy hadrons, mesons and photons.
These particles can induce permanent and transient effects that affect the
normal device operation. Ionizing dose and displacement damage can cause
chronic damage which disable the device permanently. Transient effects or
single event effects are in general recoverable with time intervals that depend
on the nature of the failure. The magnitude of these effects is technology
dependent with feature size being one of the key parameters. Analog to digital
converters are components that are frequently used in detector front end
electronics, generally placed as close as possible to the sensing elements to
maximize signal fidelity. We report on radiation effects tests conducted on 17
commercially available analog to digital converters and extensive single event
effect measurements on specific twelve and fourteen bit ADCs that presented
high tolerance to ionizing dose. Mitigation strategies for single event effects
(SEE) are discussed for their use in the large hadron collider environment.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure
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