On the Reliability of Convolutional Neural Network Implementation on SRAM-based FPGA

In recent years, topics around machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have (re-)gained a lot of interest due to high demand in industrial automation applications in various areas such as medical, automotive and space and the increasing computational power offered by technology advancements. One common task for these applications is object recognition/classification whose input is usually an image taken from camera and output is whether an object is present and the class of the object. In industrial pipeline, this task could be used to identify possible defects in products; in automotive application, such task could be deployed to detect pedestrians for Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS). When the task is safety-critical as in automotive application, the reliability of the task implementation is crucial and has to be evaluated before final deployment. On the other hand, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices are gaining increasing attention in the hardware acceleration part for machine learning applications due to their high flexibility and increasing computational power. When the SRAM-based FPGA is considered, Single Event Upset (SEU) in configuration memory induced by radiation particle is one of the major concerns even at sea level. In this paper, we present the fault injection results on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) implementation on Xilinx SRAM-based FPGA which demonstrate that though there exists built-in redundancy in CNN implementation one SEU in configuration memory can still impact the task execution results while the possibility of Single Event Multiple Upsets (SEMU) must also be taken into consideration.