NoC-based DNN Accelerator: A Future Design Paradigm

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have shown significant advantages in many domains such as pattern recognition, prediction, and control optimization. The edge computing demand in the Internet-of-Things era has motivated many kinds of computing platforms to accelerate the DNN operations. The most common platforms are CPU, GPU, ASIC, and FPGA. However, these platforms suffer from low performance (i.e., CPU and GPU), large power consumption (i.e., CPU, GPU, ASIC, and FPGA), or low computational flexibility at runtime (i.e., FPGA and ASIC). In this paper, we suggest the NoC-based DNN platform as a new accelerator design paradigm. The NoC-based designs can reduce the off-chip memory accesses through a flexible interconnect that facilitates data exchange between processing elements on the chip. We first comprehensively investigate conventional platforms and methodologies used in DNN computing. Then we study and analyze different design parameters to implement the NoC-based DNN accelerator. The presented accelerator is based on mesh topology, neuron clustering, random mapping, and XY-routing. The experimental results on LeNet, MobileNet, and VGG-16 models show the benefits of the NoC-based DNN accelerator in reducing off-chip memory accesses and improving runtime computational flexibility.