# Software-defined Design Space Exploration for an Efficient DNN Accelerator Architecture

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an application-driven framework for designing and optimizing DNN accelerators by modeling hardware and neural network compatibility, leading to efficient architectures tailored to specific applications.

## Contribution

It presents a novel hardware analytical model and a multi-dimensional optimization framework for application-specific DNN accelerator design and configuration.

## Key findings

- Framework effectively generates optimized accelerator designs for given DNNs.
- It enables hardware-aware neural network model improvements.
- The approach supports multi-application accelerator configuration optimization.

## Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to outperform conventional machine learning algorithms across a wide range of applications, e.g., image recognition, object detection, robotics, and natural language processing. However, the high computational complexity of DNNs often necessitates extremely fast and efficient hardware. The problem gets worse as the size of neural networks grows exponentially. As a result, customized hardware accelerators have been developed to accelerate DNN processing without sacrificing model accuracy. However, previous accelerator design studies have not fully considered the characteristics of the target applications, which may lead to sub-optimal architecture designs. On the other hand, new DNN models have been developed for better accuracy, but their compatibility with the underlying hardware accelerator is often overlooked. In this article, we propose an application-driven framework for architectural design space exploration of DNN accelerators. This framework is based on a hardware analytical model of individual DNN operations. It models the accelerator design task as a multi-dimensional optimization problem. We demonstrate that it can be efficaciously used in application-driven accelerator architecture design. Given a target DNN, the framework can generate efficient accelerator design solutions with optimized performance and area. Furthermore, we explore the opportunity to use the framework for accelerator configuration optimization under simultaneous diverse DNN applications. The framework is also capable of improving neural network models to best fit the underlying hardware resources.