A Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator Based on NVDLA

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been successfully applied to a wider range of fields, such as image recognition and natural language processing. With the application of CNN to solve more complex problems, their computing and storage requirements are also greatly increased. Traditionally, CNN is executed on CPU and GPU, but their low throughput and energy efficiency are the bottleneck of using them. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has many characteristics suitable for acceleration, it has become an ideal platform for hardware acceleration of CNN. We design and implement a convolutional neural network accelerator based on NVIDIA deep learning accelerator (NVDLA) on FPGA platform. We give the detailed structure of NVDLA, design the hardware system and software system. The neural networks that NVDLA can support are limited, but our architecture can realize the high bandwidth data communication between NVDLA and CPU. CPU handle the operations that NVDLA does not support. The accelerator will support more and more complex networks in the future.