High performance accelerators for deep neural networks: A review

The availability of huge structured and unstructured data, advanced highly dense memory and high performance computing machines have provided a strong push for the development in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) domains. AI and machine learning has rekindled the hope of efficiently solving complex problems which was not possible in the recent past. The generation and availability of big-data is a strong driving force for the development of AI/ML applications, however, several challenges need to be addressed, like processing speed, memory requirement, high bandwidth, low latency memory access, and highly conductive and flexible connections between processing units and memory blocks. The conventional computing platforms are unable to address these issues with machine learning and AI. Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely employed for machine learning and AI applications, like speech recognition, computer vison, robotics, and so forth, efficiently and accurately. However, accuracy is achieved at the cost of high computational complexity, sacrificing energy efficiency and throughput like performance measuring parameters along with high latency. To address the problems of latency, energy efficiency, complexity, power consumption, and so forth, a lot of state of the art DNN accelerators have been designed and implemented in the form of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This work provides the state of the art of all these DNN accelerators which have been developed recently. Various DNN architectures, their computing units, emerging technologies used in improving the performance of DNN accelerators will be discussed. Finally, we will try to explore the scope for further improvement in these accelerator designs, various opportunities and challenges for the future research.