Hardware Automated Dataflow Deployment of CNNs

TL;DR

This paper presents haddoc2, an open source tool that automatically converts CNN descriptions into FPGA hardware descriptions, enabling direct hardware mapping for accelerated execution.

Contribution

The paper introduces haddoc2, a novel tool that automates the hardware deployment of CNNs onto FPGAs through direct mapping, simplifying and speeding up the design process.

Findings

Feasibility of direct hardware mapping of CNNs onto FPGAs demonstrated.

Haddoc2 automates CNN to FPGA hardware description transformation.

Open source implementation available for broader use.

Abstract

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the state of the art systems for image classification and scene understating. However, such techniques are computationally intensive and involve highly regular parallel computation. CNNs can thus benefit from a significant acceleration in execution time when running on fine grain programmable logic devices. As a consequence, several studies have proposed FPGA-based accelerators for CNNs. However, because of the huge amount of the required hardware resources, none of these studies directly was based on a direct mapping of the CNN computing elements onto the FPGA physical resources. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of this so-called direct hardware mapping approach and discuss several associated implementation issues. As a proof of concept, we introduce the haddoc2 open source tool, that is able to automatically transform a CNN description into a platform independent hardware description for FPGA implementation.