2,925 research outputs found
Baseband analog front-end and digital back-end for reconfigurable multi-standard terminals
Multimedia applications are driving wireless network operators to add high-speed data services such as Edge (E-GPRS), WCDMA (UMTS) and WLAN (IEEE 802.11a,b,g) to the existing GSM network. This creates the need for multi-mode cellular handsets that support a wide range of communication standards, each with a different RF frequency, signal bandwidth, modulation scheme etc. This in turn generates several design challenges for the analog and digital building blocks of the physical layer. In addition to the above-mentioned protocols, mobile devices often include Bluetooth, GPS, FM-radio and TV services that can work concurrently with data and voice communication. Multi-mode, multi-band, and multi-standard mobile terminals must satisfy all these different requirements. Sharing and/or switching transceiver building blocks in these handsets is mandatory in order to extend battery life and/or reduce cost. Only adaptive circuits that are able to reconfigure themselves within the handover time can meet the design requirements of a single receiver or transmitter covering all the different standards while ensuring seamless inter-interoperability. This paper presents analog and digital base-band circuits that are able to support GSM (with Edge), WCDMA (UMTS), WLAN and Bluetooth using reconfigurable building blocks. The blocks can trade off power consumption for performance on the fly, depending on the standard to be supported and the required QoS (Quality of Service) leve
NeuroFlow: A General Purpose Spiking Neural Network Simulation Platform using Customizable Processors
© 2016 Cheung, Schultz and Luk.NeuroFlow is a scalable spiking neural network simulation platform for off-the-shelf high performance computing systems using customizable hardware processors such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Unlike multi-core processors and application-specific integrated circuits, the processor architecture of NeuroFlow can be redesigned and reconfigured to suit a particular simulation to deliver optimized performance, such as the degree of parallelism to employ. The compilation process supports using PyNN, a simulator-independent neural network description language, to configure the processor. NeuroFlow supports a number of commonly used current or conductance based neuronal models such as integrate-and-fire and Izhikevich models, and the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule for learning. A 6-FPGA system can simulate a network of up to ~600,000 neurons and can achieve a real-time performance of 400,000 neurons. Using one FPGA, NeuroFlow delivers a speedup of up to 33.6 times the speed of an 8-core processor, or 2.83 times the speed of GPU-based platforms. With high flexibility and throughput, NeuroFlow provides a viable environment for large-scale neural network simulation
ONNX-to-Hardware Design Flow for the Generation of Adaptive Neural-Network Accelerators on FPGAs
Neural Networks (NN) provide a solid and reliable way of executing different
types of applications, ranging from speech recognition to medical diagnosis,
speeding up onerous and long workloads. The challenges involved in their
implementation at the edge include providing diversity, flexibility, and
sustainability. That implies, for instance, supporting evolving applications
and algorithms energy-efficiently. Using hardware or software accelerators can
deliver fast and efficient computation of the \acp{nn}, while flexibility can
be exploited to support long-term adaptivity. Nonetheless, handcrafting an NN
for a specific device, despite the possibility of leading to an optimal
solution, takes time and experience, and that's why frameworks for hardware
accelerators are being developed. This work-in-progress study focuses on
exploring the possibility of combining the toolchain proposed by Ratto et al.,
which has the distinctive ability to favor adaptivity, with approximate
computing. The goal will be to allow lightweight adaptable NN inference on
FPGAs at the edge. Before that, the work presents a detailed review of
established frameworks that adopt a similar streaming architecture for future
comparison.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the CPS workshop 2023
(http://www.cpsschool.eu/cps-workshop
Design automation of approximate circuits with runtime reconfigurable accuracy
Leveraging the inherent error tolerance of a vast number of application domains that are rapidly growing, approximate computing arises as a design alternative to improve the efficiency of our computing systems by trading accuracy for energy savings. However, the requirement for computational accuracy is not fixed. Controlling the applied level of approximation dynamically at runtime is a key to effectively optimize energy, while still containing and bounding the induced errors at runtime. In this paper, we propose and implement an automatic and circuit independent design framework that generates approximate circuits with dynamically reconfigurable accuracy at runtime. The generated circuits feature varying accuracy levels, supporting also accurate execution. Extensive experimental evaluation, using industry strength flow and circuits, demonstrates that our generated approximate circuits improve the energy by up to 41% for 2% error bound and by 17.5% on average under a pessimistic scenario that assumes full accuracy requirement in the 33% of the runtime. To demonstrate further the efficiency of our framework, we considered two state-of-the-art technology libraries which are a 7nm conventional FinFET and an emerging technology that boosts performance at a high cost of increased dynamic power
Application-Driven Synthesis of Energy-Efficient Reconfigurable-Precision Operators
The increasing performance demands in emerging Internet of Things applications clash with the low energy budgets of end-nodes. Therefore, hardware operators able to reconfigure their computational precision at runtime are increasingly employed in these devices, to obtain good-enough results at minimal energy costs. Among the many methods proposed to implement such operators, Dynamic Voltage and Accuracy Scaling (DVAS) is particularly promising, due to its broad applicability and low overheads. However, a straight-forward application of DVAS conflicts with the optimizations performed by classic EDA algorithms, and does not yield the expected results. In this paper, we propose a novel synthesis algorithm for reconfigurable-precision circuits, that allows to integrate DVAS in a standard implementation flow. Moreover, we show how this algorithm can exploit information about the application, namely on the frequency of usage of each precision, to further reduce the total energy consumption. Applying our method to the popular LeNet neural network for digit recognition, we are able to reduce the energy due to Multiply-And-Accumulate (MAC) operations by 25%, compared to a straight-forward application of DVAS
hls4ml: An Open-Source Codesign Workflow to Empower Scientific Low-Power Machine Learning Devices
Accessible machine learning algorithms, software, and diagnostic tools for
energy-efficient devices and systems are extremely valuable across a broad
range of application domains. In scientific domains, real-time near-sensor
processing can drastically improve experimental design and accelerate
scientific discoveries. To support domain scientists, we have developed hls4ml,
an open-source software-hardware codesign workflow to interpret and translate
machine learning algorithms for implementation with both FPGA and ASIC
technologies. We expand on previous hls4ml work by extending capabilities and
techniques towards low-power implementations and increased usability: new
Python APIs, quantization-aware pruning, end-to-end FPGA workflows, long
pipeline kernels for low power, and new device backends include an ASIC
workflow. Taken together, these and continued efforts in hls4ml will arm a new
generation of domain scientists with accessible, efficient, and powerful tools
for machine-learning-accelerated discovery.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, TinyML Research Symposium 202
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