CapsAcc: An Efficient Hardware Accelerator for CapsuleNets with Data Reuse

Alberto Marchisio, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Muhammad Shafique

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Recently, CapsuleNets have overtaken traditional Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), because of their improved generalization ability due to the multi-dimensional capsules, in contrast to the single-dimensional neurons. Consequently, CapsuleNets also require extremely intense matrix computations, making it a gigantic challenge to achieve high performance. In this paper, we propose CapsAcc, the first specialized CMOS-based hardware architecture to perform CapsuleNets inference with high performance and energy efficiency. State-of-the- art convolutional CNN accelerators would not work efficiently for CapsuleNets, as their designs do not account for unique processing nature of CapsuleNets involving multi-dimensional matrix processing, squashing and dynamic routing. Our architecture exploits the massive parallelism by flexibly feeding the data to a specialized systolic array according to the operations required in different layers. It also avoids extensive load and store operations on the on-chip memory, by reusing the data when possible. We synthesized the complete CapsAcc architecture in a 32nm CMOS technology using Synopsys design tools, and evaluated it for the MNIST benchmark (as also done by the original CapsuleNet paper) to ensure consistent and fair comparisons. This work enables highly-efficient CapsuleNets inference on embedded platforms.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2019 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2019
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages964-967
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9783981926323
DOIs
StatePublished - May 14 2019
Event22nd Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2019 - Florence, Italy
Duration: Mar 25 2019Mar 29 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2019 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2019

Conference

Conference22nd Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE 2019
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityFlorence
Period3/25/193/29/19

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Control and Optimization

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