Analysis of on-chip communication properties in accelerator architectures for Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) algorithms are expected to be core components of next-generation applications. These high performance sensing and recognition algorithms are key enabling technologies of smarter systems that make appropriate decisions about their environment. The integration of these compute-intensive and memory-hungry algorithms into embedded systems will require the use of specific energy-efficient hardware accelerators. The intrinsic parallelism of DNNs algorithms allows for the use of a large number of small processing elements, and the tight exploitation of data reuse can significantly reduce power consumption. To meet these features, many dataflow models and on-chip communication proposals have been studied in recent years. This paper proposes a comprehensive study of on-chip communication properties based on the analysis of application-specific features, such as data reuse and communication models, as well as the results of mapping these applications to architectures of different sizes. In addition, the influence of mechanisms such as broadcast and multicast on performance and energy efficiency is analyzed. This study leads to the definition of overarching features to be integrated into next-generation on-chip communication infrastructures for CNN accelerators.