Designing energy-efficient computing systems using equalization and machine learning

As technology scaling slows down in the nanometer CMOS regime and mobile computing becomes more ubiquitous, designing energy-efficient hardware for mobile systems is becoming increasingly critical and challenging. Although various approaches like near-threshold computing (NTC), aggressive voltage scaling with shadow latches, etc. have been proposed to get the most out of limited battery life, there is still no “silver bullet” to increasing power-performance demands of the mobile systems. Moreover, given that a mobile system could operate in a variety of environmental conditions, like different temperatures, have varying performance requirements, etc., there is a growing need for designing tunable/reconfigurable systems in order to achieve energy-efficient operation. In this work we propose to address the energy- efficiency problem of mobile systems using two different approaches: circuit tunability and distributed adaptive algorithms. Inspired by the communication systems, we developed feedback equalization based digital logic that changes the threshold of its gates based on the input pattern. We showed that feedback equalization in static complementary CMOS logic enabled up to 20% reduction in energy dissipation while maintaining the performance metrics. We also achieved 30% reduction in energy dissipation for pass-transistor digital logic (PTL) with equalization while maintaining performance. In addition, we proposed a mechanism that leverages feedback equalization techniques to achieve near optimal operation of static complementary CMOS logic blocks over the entire voltage range from near threshold supply voltage to nominal supply voltage. Using energy-delay product (EDP) as a metric we analyzed the use of the feedback equalizer as part of various sequential computational blocks. Our analysis shows that for near-threshold voltage operation, when equalization was used, we can improve the operating frequency by up to 30%, while the energy increase was less than 15%, with an overall EDP reduction of ≈10%. We also observe an EDP reduction of close to 5% across entire above-threshold voltage range. On the distributed adaptive algorithm front, we explored energy-efficient hardware implementation of machine learning algorithms. We proposed an adaptive classifier that leverages the wide variability in data complexity to enable energy-efficient data classification operations for mobile systems. Our approach takes advantage of varying classification hardness across data to dynamically allocate resources and improve energy efficiency. On average, our adaptive classifier is ≈100× more energy efficient but has ≈1% higher error rate than a complex radial basis function classifier and is ≈10× less energy efficient but has ≈40% lower error rate than a simple linear classifier across a wide range of classification data sets. We also developed a field of groves (FoG) implementation of random forests (RF) that achieves an accuracy comparable to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) under tight energy budgets. The FoG architecture takes advantage of the fact that in random forests a small portion of the weak classifiers (decision trees) might be sufficient to achieve high statistical performance. By dividing the random forest into smaller forests (Groves), and conditionally executing the rest of the forest, FoG is able to achieve much higher energy efficiency levels for comparable error rates. We also take advantage of the distributed nature of the FoG to achieve high level of parallelism. Our evaluation shows that at maximum achievable accuracies FoG consumes ≈1.48×, ≈24×, ≈2.5×, and ≈34.7× lower energy per classification compared to conventional RF, SVM-RBF , Multi-Layer Perceptron Network (MLP), and CNN, respectively. FoG is 6.5× less energy efficient than SVM-LR, but achieves 18% higher accuracy on average across all considered datasets

Artificial neural networks and their applications to intelligent fault diagnosis of power transmission lines

Over the past thirty years, the idea of computing based on models inspired by human brains and biological neural networks emerged. Artificial neural networks play an important role in the field of machine learning and hold the key to the success of performing many intelligent tasks by machines. They are used in various applications such as pattern recognition, data classification, stock market prediction, aerospace, weather forecasting, control systems, intelligent automation, robotics, and healthcare. Their architectures generally consist of an input layer, multiple hidden layers, and one output layer. They can be implemented on software or hardware. Nowadays, various structures with various names exist for artificial neural networks, each of which has its own particular applications. Those used types in this study include feedforward neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and general regression neural networks. Increasing the number of layers in artificial neural networks as needed for large datasets, implies increased computational expenses. Therefore, besides these basic structures in deep learning, some advanced techniques are proposed to overcome the drawbacks of original structures in deep learning such as transfer learning, federated learning, and reinforcement learning. Furthermore, implementing artificial neural networks in hardware gives scientists and engineers the chance to perform high-dimensional and big data-related tasks because it removes the constraints of memory access time defined as the von Neuman bottleneck. Accordingly, analog and digital circuits are used for artificial neural network implementations without using general-purpose CPUs. In this study, the problem of fault detection, identification, and location estimation of transmission lines is studied and various deep learning approaches are implemented and designed as solutions. This research work focuses on the transmission lines’ datasets, their faults, and the importance of identification, detection, and location estimation of them. It also includes a comprehensive review of the previous studies to perform these three tasks. The application of various artificial neural networks such as feedforward neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and general regression neural networks for identification, detection, and location estimation of transmission line datasets are also discussed in this study. Some advanced methods based on artificial neural networks are taken into account in this thesis such as the transfer learning technique. These methodologies are designed and applied on transmission line datasets to enable the scientist and engineers with using fewer data points for the training purpose and wasting less time on the training step. This work also proposes a transfer learning-based technique for distinguishing faulty and non-faulty insulators in transmission line images. Besides, an effective design for an activation function of the artificial neural networks is proposed in this thesis. Using hyperbolic tangent as an activation function in artificial neural networks has several benefits including inclusiveness and high accuracy