A Scalable Architecture for CNN Accelerators Leveraging High-Performance Memories

Abstract

As FPGA-based accelerators become ubiquitous and more powerful, the demand for integration with High-Performance Memory (HPM) grows. Although HPMs offer a much greater bandwidth than standard DDR4 DRAM, they introduce new design challenges such as increased latency and higher bandwidth mismatch between memory and FPGA cores. This paper presents a scalable architecture for convolutional neural network accelerators conceived specifically to address these challenges and make full use of the memory's high bandwidth. The accelerator, which was designed using high-level synthesis, is highly configurable. The intrinsic parallelism of its architecture allows near-perfect scaling up to saturating the available memory bandwidth.