A 617 TOPS/W All Digital Binary Neural Network Accelerator in 10nm FinFET CMOS

Abstract

A 10nm digital Binary Neural Network (BNN) chip implements 1b activations and weights for compute density of 418TOPS/mm2 and memory density of 414KB/mm2. The chip achieves an energy efficiency of 617TOPS/W by leveraging Compute Near Memory (CNM), parallel inner product compute, and Near-Threshold Voltage (NTV) operation. The digital BNN design approaches the energy efficiency of analog in-memory techniques while also ensuring deterministic, scalable, and precise operation.