Jaeha Kung

This paper presents a programmable and scalable digital neuromorphic architecture based on 3D high-density memory integrated with logic tier for efficient neural computing. The proposed architecture consists of clusters of processing engines, connected by 2D mesh network as a processing tier, which is integrated in 3D with multiple tiers of DRAM. The PE clusters access multiple memory channels (vaults) in parallel. The operating principle, referred to as the memory centric computing, embeds spec

This paper presents a programmable and scalable digital neuromorphic architecture based on 3D high-density memory integrated with logic tier for efficient neural computing. The proposed architecture consists of clusters of processing engines, connected by 2D mesh network as a processing tier, which is integrated in 3D with multiple tiers of DRAM. The PE clusters access multiple memory channels (vaults) in parallel. The operating principle, referred to as the memory centric computing, embeds spec

In this paper, we present a novel approximate computing scheme suitable for realizing the energy-efficient multiply-accumulate (MAC) processing. In contrast to the prior works that suffer from the error accumulation limiting the approximate range, we utilize different approximate multipliers in an interleaved way to compensate errors in the opposite direction during accumulate operations. For the balanced error accumulation, we first design the approximate 4-2 compressors generating errors in th

This paper proposes that approximation by reducing bit-precision and using inexact multiplier can save power consumption of digital multilayer perceptron accelerator during the classification of MNIST (inference) with negligible accuracy degradation. Based on the error sensitivity precomputed during the training, synaptic weights with less sensitivity are approximated. Under given bit-precision modes, our proposed algorithm determines bit precision for all synapse to minimize power consumption f

This paper proposes a power-aware digital feedforward neural network platform that utilizes the backpropagation algorithm during training to enable energy-quality trade-off. Given a quality constraint, the proposed approach identifies a set of synaptic weights for approximation in a neural network. The approach selects synapses with small impact on output error, estimated by the backpropagation algorithm, for approximation. The approximations are achieved by a coupled software (reduced bit-width

Training of neural network can be accelerated by limited numerical precision together with specialized low-precision hardware. This paper studies how low precision can impact on entire training of RNNs. We emulate low precision training for recently proposed gated recurrent unit (GRU) and use dynamic fixed point as a target numeric format. We first show that batch normalization on input sequences can help speed up training with low precision as well as high precision. We also show that the overf

Neural networks generally require significant memory capacity/bandwidth to store/access a large number of synaptic weights. This paper presents an application of JPEG image encoding to compress the weights by exploiting the spatial locality and smoothness of the weight matrix. To minimize the loss of accuracy due to JPEG encoding, we propose to adaptively control the quantization factor of the JPEG algorithm depending on the error-sensitivity (gradient) of each weight. With the adaptive compress

In this brief, we present a novel design methodology of cost-effective approximate radix-4 Booth multipliers, which can significantly reduce the power consumption of error-resilient signal processing tasks. In contrast that the prior studies only focus on the approximation of either the partial product generation with encoders or the partial product reductions with compressors, the proposed method considers two major processing steps jointly by forcing the generated error directions to be opposi

When training deep neural networks (DNNs), expensive floating point arithmetic units are used in GPUs or custom neural processing units (NPUs). To reduce the burden of floating point arithmetic, community has started exploring the use of more efficient data representations, e.g., block floating point (BFP). The BFP format allows a group of values to share an exponent, which effectively reduces the memory footprint and enables cheaper fixed point arithmetic for multiply-accumulate (MAC) operation

This paper presents an approximate computing method of long short-term memory (LSTM) operations for energy-efficient end-to-end speech recognition. We newly introduce the concept of similarity score, which can measure how much the inputs of two adjacent LSTM cells are similar to each other. Then, we disable the highly-similar LSTM operations and directly transfer the prior results for reducing the computational costs of speech recognition. The pseudo-LSTM operation is additionally defined for pr

This paper studies the opportunities of energy-accuracy tradeoff in cellular neural network (CNN). Algorithmic characteristics of CNN is coupled with hardware-induced error distribution of a digital CNN cell to evaluate energy-accuracy tradeoff for simple image processing tasks as well as a complex application. The analysis shows that errors modulate the cell dynamics and propagate through the network degrading the output quality and increasing the convergence time. The error propagation is dete

A floorplanning has a potential to reduce chip temperature due to the conductive nature of heat. If floorplan optimization, which is usually based on simulated annealing, is employed to reduce temperature, its evaluation should be done extremely fast with high accuracy. A new thermal index, named thermal signature, is proposed. It approximates the temperature calculation, which is done by taking the product of Green's function and power density integrated over space. The correlation coefficient

The fast and energy-efficient simulation of dynamical systems defined by coupled ordinary/partial differential equations has emerged as an important problem. The accelerated simulation of coupled ODE/PDE is critical for analysis of physical systems as well as computing with dynamical systems. This paper presents a fast and programmable accelerator for simulating dynamical systems. The computing model of the proposed platform is based on multilayer cellular nonlinear network (CeNN) augmented with

This paper presents methodology of feedback-controlled dynamic approximation to enable energy-accuracy trade-off in digital recurrent neural network (RNN). A low-power digital RNN engine is presented that employs the proposed dynamic approximation. The on-chip feedback controller is realized by utilizing hysteretic or proportional controller. The dynamic adaptation of bit-precisions during the RNN computation is selected as approximation approach. Considering various applications, the digital RN