RAMAN: a reconfigurable and sparse tinyML accelerator for inference on edge

Deep neural network (DNN)-based inference at the edge is challenging as these compute, and data-intensive algorithms need to be implemented at low cost and low power while meeting the latency constraints of the target applications. Sparsity, in both activations and weights inherent to DNNs, is a key knob to leverage. In this article, we present RAMAN, a Re-configurable and spArse tinyML Accelerator for infereNce on edge, architected to exploit the sparsity to reduce area (storage), power, as well as latency. RAMAN can be configured to support a wide range of DNN topologies—consisting of different convolution layer types and a range of layer parameters (feature-map size and the number of channels). RAMAN can also be configured to support accuracy versus power/latency tradeoffs using techniques deployed at compile-time and run-time. We present the salient features of the architecture, provide implementation results, and compare the same with the state of the art. RAMAN employs novel dataflow inspired by Gustavson’s algorithm that has optimal input activation (IA) and output activation (OA) reuse to minimize memory access and the overall data movement cost. The dataflow allows RAMAN to locally reduce the partial sum (Psum) within a processing element array to eliminate the Psum writeback traffic. Additionally, we suggest a method to reduce peak activation memory by overlapping IA and OA on the same memory space, which can reduce storage requirements by up to 50%. RAMAN was implemented on a low-power and resource-constrained Efinix Ti60 FPGA with 37.2K LUTs and 8.6K register utilization. RAMAN processes all layers of the MobileNetV1 model at 98.47 GOp/s/W and the DS-CNN model at 79.68 GOp/s/W by leveraging both weight and activation sparsity.