VLIW Code Generation for a Convolutional Network Accelerator

This paper presents a compiler flow to map Deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) to a highly specialized VLIW accelerator core targeting the low-power embedded market. Earlier works have focused on energy efficient accelerators for this class of algorithms, but none of them provides a complete and practical programming model. Due to the large parameter set of a ConvNet it is essential that the user can abstract from the accelerator architecture and does not have to rely on an error prone and ad-hoc assembly programming model. By using modulo scheduling for software pipelining we demonstrate that our automatic generated code achieves equal or within 5-20% less hardware utilization w.r.t. code written manually by experts. Our compiler removes the huge manual workload to efficiently map ConvNets to an energy-efficient core for the next-generation mobile and wearable devices.