alexzhang007 / convnetasic

ConvNetAsic

This is an on-going project to develop the ASIC generator for a specific neural network architecture provided by the Caffe Prototxt file.

Installation

The dependency for the current project includes the SystemC and the Google Protocol Buffers.

The Makfile is provided for GCC compilation on Linux. The variable $SYSTEMC_ROOT shoud be changed accordingly based on the installation location of SystemC on your system. There are 2 more vairables $DATA_PATH and $DEBUG, which can be turned off to compile a faster version, but without the data path information in the system.

Usage

After compilation, an executable file main will be generated in the current path. You need provide a configuration file to define the basic configuration of the system, e.g. bit width, CNN prototxt file, etc. A sampled configuration is provided in the main directory, named "config.prototxt".

The program can be invoked by typing the following command in the console:

$ ./main -c config.prototxt

During execution, the system will first analyzes the Caffe network and does the basic analysis on the operation complexity on each layer. The ASIC system will be generated based on a naive algorithm (should be improved later). A thorough cycle accurate simulation will be conducted to obtain the performance metric. By far, the system will bypass the trivial layers, such as ReLU, normalization, etc. It can support for a wide range of neural network architectures including inception-v4 except ResNet.

A trace file (*.vcd) with the specified name will be generated during the simulation, which can be viewed through common waveform viewers, such as Modelsim and VCS.

At the end of simulation, a detailed throughput and area breakdown the generated system will be exported.

The RTL model will be dumped to the hard coded projects file.

TODO list

• Analysis of throughput, buffer, area, power relationship.
• Optimization of hardware resource allocations.
• Right now, the SystemC mode has been disabled temporarily in the main file. Currently, the Program is in the RTL compiler mode.