학술논문

Energy-Efficient Brain Floating Point Convolutional Neural Network Using Memristors
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices IEEE Trans. Electron Devices Electron Devices, IEEE Transactions on. 71(5):3293-3300 May, 2024
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Memristors
Arrays
Artificial intelligence
Convolutional neural networks
Arithmetic
Energy efficiency
Computational modeling
Convolutional neural network (CNN)
floating-point (FP) computing
in-memory computing (IMC)
memristor
Language
ISSN
0018-9383
1557-9646
Abstract
In this article, a memristor-based convolutional neural network (CNN) is implemented to achieve both brain floating point (BF16) processing accuracy and high energy efficiency for cloud artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration for the first time. A low-cost in-memory floating-point (FP) computing arithmetic is developed with an approximate computing technique, which sufficiently considers the requirement of both efficiency and accuracy in FP-CNN applications. For further optimization, we investigate the impact of nonideal effects at the device and array level (including the device variation, line resistance, array parasitic capacitance, etc.) on analog computing. Based on these, a bit-weight slicing technique is employed for highly efficient and accurate FP computing within the memristor crossbar array. Meanwhile, an in-memory convolutional operating method is proposed to further reduce the hardware overhead in deploying large-scale CNNs for complex datasets. By combining the above strategies, we evaluate the performance of memristor-implemented BF16-CNNs using the VGG-16 network on the CIFAR-10 dataset. An 85.47% classification accuracy with 1.987 TFLOPS/W energy efficiency and 20.9895 GFLOPS/mm2 area efficiency is obtained.