Efficient Systolic Array Based on Decomposable MAC for Quantized Deep Neural Networks

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved high accuracy in various machine learning applications in recent years. As the recognition accuracy of deep learning applications increases, reducing the complexity of these neural networks and performing the DNN computation on embedded systems or mobile devices become an emerging and crucial challenge. Quantization has been presented to reduce the utilization of computational resources by compressing the input data and weights from floating-point numbers to integers with shorter bit-width. For practical power reduction, it is necessary to operate these DNNs with quantized parameters on appropriate hardware. Therefore, systolic arrays are adopted to be the major computation units for matrix multiplication in DNN accelerators. To obtain a better tradeoff between the precision/accuracy and power consumption, using parameters with various bit-widths among different layers within a DNN is an advanced quantization method. In this paper, we propose a novel decomposition strategy to construct a low-power decomposable multiplier-accumulator (MAC) for the energy efficiency of quantized DNNs. In the experiments, when 65% multiplication operations of VGG-16 are operated in shorter bit-width with at most 1% accuracy loss on the CIFAR-10 dataset, our decomposable MAC has 50% energy reduction compared with a non-decomposable MAC.