An Efficient and Fast Softmax Hardware Architecture (EFSHA) for Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks are widely used in computer vision applications due to their high performance. However, DNNs involve a large number of computations in the training and inference phase. Among the different layers of a DNN, the softmax layer has one of the most complex computations as it involves exponent and division operations. So, a hardware-efficient implementation is required to reduce the on-chip resources. In this paper, we propose a new hardware-efficient and fast implementation of the softmax activation function. The proposed hardware implementation consumes fewer hardware resources and works at high speed as compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.