Thetwilight of Dennardscalinghasactivatedaglobaltrendtowards application-based hardware specialization. This trend is currently accelerating due to the surging democratization and deployment of machine learning on mobile and IoT compute platforms. At the same time, the growing complexity of specialized system-on-chips (SoCs) is levying a more laborious tax on ASIC companies’ design and verification efforts. High-level synthesis (HLS) is emerging as a foremost agile VLSI development methodology gaining increasing adoption in the hardware design community. However, concerns over Quality of Results (QoR) remain a key factor inhibiting more mainstream adoption of HLS. Obtaining optimal PPA outcomes can sometimes be an elusive or challenging task and strongly correlates with the syntactic approach of the high-level source code. In this paper, we aim to share the proven HLS practices we employed to raise the level of confidence in the post-silicon functional and performance expectations from our accelerator designs. In doing so, we recount some of the main challenges we encountered in our HLS-based hardware-software co-design journey and offer a few recommendations cultivated from our learnings. Finally, we posit on wheretheresearch opportunities to further improve design QoR and HLS user experience lie.

This article consists only of a collection of slides from the author's conference presentation.

This paper describes a 16nm programmable accelerator for unsupervised probabilistic machine perception tasks that performs Bayesian inference on probabilistic models mapped onto a 2D Markov Random Field, using MCMC. Exploiting two degrees of parallelism, it performs Gibbs sampling inference at up to 1380× faster with 1965× less energy than an Arm Cortex-A53 on the same SoC, and 1.5× faster with 6.3× less energy than an embedded FPGA in the same technology. At 0.8V, it runs at 450MHz, producing 44.6 MSamples/s at 0.88 nJ/sample.

Always-on subsystems in mobile/Internet of Things (IoT) SoCs process a variety of real-time sensor data deep neural network (DNN) classification workloads in a heavily constrained energy budget. This can be achieved with robust, low-voltage circuits, and specialized hardware accelerators. We present a 16-nm always-on DNN processor, which consists primarily of a microcontroller and a DNN accelerator with on-chip SRAM for the model weights. The design operates robustly from 0.4 to 1-V, with calibration-free automatic voltage/frequency tuning provided by tracking small non-zero razor timing error rates. A novel timing error-driven synchronization-free adaptive clocking scheme significantly reduces the adaptation latency to provide resilience to fast on-chip supply noise and reduce margins. To accommodate the tight energy constraints of always-on IoT workloads, we implement a multi-cycle SRAM read scheme that allows the memory voltage to scale at iso-throughput, improving energy efficiency across the entire operating range. The wide operating range allows for high performance at 1.36 GHz, low-power consumption downs to 750 μW, and stateof-the-art raw efficiency at 16-bit precision of 750 GOPS/W dense or 1.81 TOPS/W sparse.

This paper presents a 25mm^2 SoC in 16nm FinFET technology targeting flexible acceleration of compute intensive kernels in DNN, DSP and security algorithms. The SoC includes an always-on sub-system, a dual-core Arm A53 CPU cluster, an embedded FPGA array, and a quad-core cache-coherent accelerator cluster. Measurement results demonstrate the following observations: 1) moving DSP/cryptography kernels from A53 to eFPGA increases energy efficiency between 5.5× - 28.9×, 2) the use of cache coherency for datapath accelerators increases throughput by 2.94×, and 3) accelerator flexibility-efficiency (GOPS/W) range spans from 3.1× (A53+S1MD), to 16.5× (eFPGA), to 54.5× (CCA) compared to the dual-core CPU baseline on comparable tasks. The energy per inference on MobileNet-128 CNN shows a peak improvement of 47.6×.

Always-on classifiers for sensor data require a very wide operating range to support a variety of real-time workloads and must operate robustly at low supply voltages. We present a 16nm always-on wake-up controller with a fully-connected (FC) Deep Neural Network (DNN) accelerator that operates from 0.4-1 V. Calibration-free automatic voltage/frequency tuning is provided by tracking small non-zero Razor timing-error rates, and a novel timing-error driven sync-free fast adaptive clocking scheme provides resilience to on-chip supply voltage noise. The model access burden of neural networks is relaxed using a multicycle SRAM read, which allows memory voltage to be reduced at iso-throughput. The wide operating range allows for high performance at 1.36GHz, low-power consumption down to 750μW and state-of-the-art raw efficiency at 16-bit precision of 750 GOPS/W dense, or 1.81 TOPS/W sparse.

Emerging Internet of Things (IoT) devices necessitate system-on-chips (SoCs) that can scale from ultralow power always-on (AON) operation, all the way up to less frequent high-performance tasks at high energy efficiency. Specialized accelerators are essential to help meet these needs at both ends of the scale, but maintaining workload flexibility remains an important goal. This article presents a 25-mm² SoC in 16-nm FinFET technology which demonstrates targeted, flexible acceleration of key compute-intensive kernels spanning machine learning (ML), DSP, and cryptography. The SMIV SoC includes a dedicated AON sub-system, a dual-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU cluster, an SoC-attached embedded field-programmable gate array (eFPGA) array, and a quad-core cache-coherent accelerator (CCA) cluster. Measurement results demonstrate: 1) 1236x power envelope, from 1.1 mW (only AON cluster), up to 1.36 W (whole SoC at maximum throughput); 2) 5.5-28.9x energy efficiency gain from offloading compute kernels from A53 to eFPGA; 3) 2.94x latency improvement using coherent memory access (CCA cluster); and 4) 55x MobileNetV1 energy per inference improvement on CCA compared to the CPU baseline. The overall flexibility-efficiency range on SMIV spans measured energy efficiencies of 1x (dual-core A53), 3.1x (A53 with SIMD), 16.5x (eFPGA), 54.9x (CCA), and 256x (AON) at a peak efficiency of 4.8 TOPS/W.

This paper presents a 28-nm system-on-chip (SoC) for Internet of things (IoT) applications with a programmable accelerator design that implements a powerful fully connected deep neural network (DNN) classifier. To reach the required low energy consumption, we exploit the key properties of neural network algorithms: parallelism, data reuse, small/sparse data, and noise tolerance. We map the algorithm to a very large scale integration (VLSI) architecture based around an singleinstruction, multiple-data data path with hardware support to exploit data sparsity by completely eliding unnecessary computation and data movement. This approach exploits sparsity, without compromising the parallel computation. We also exploit the inherent algorithmic noise-tolerance of neural networks, by introducing circuit-level timing violation detection to allow worst case voltage guard-bands to be minimized. The resulting intermittent timing violations may result in logic errors, which conventionally need to be corrected. However, in lieu of explicit error correction, we cope with this by accentuating the noise tolerance of neural networks. The measured test chip achieves high classification accuracy (98.36% for the MNIST test set), while tolerating aggregate timing violation rates>10 -1 . The accelerator achieves a minimum energy of 0.36 μJ/inference at 667 MHz; maximum throughput at 1.2 GHz and 0.57 μJ/inference; or a 10% margined operating point at 1 GHz and 0.58 μJ/inference.

This paper presents a 28nm SoC with a programmable FC-DNN accelerator design that demonstrates: (1) HW support to exploit data sparsity by eliding unnecessary computations (4× energy reduction); (2) improved algorithmic error tolerance using sign-magnitude number format for weights and datapath computation; (3) improved circuit-level timing violation tolerance in datapath logic via timeborrowing; (4) combined circuit and algorithmic resilience with Razor timing violation detection to reduce energy via VDD scaling or increase throughput via FCLK scaling; and (5) high classification accuracy (98.36% for MNIST test set) while tolerating aggregate timing violation rates >10-1. The accelerator achieves a minimum energy of 0.36μJ/pred at 667MHz, maximum throughput at 1.2GHz and 0.57μJ/pred, or a 10%-margined operating point at 1GHz and 0.58μJ/pred.