GQNA: Generic Quantized DNN Accelerator With Weight-Repetition-Aware Activation Aggregating

Quantization is a prominent approach to compress model sizes of deep neural networks (DNNs), which clusters high-precision weights into a smaller set of quantization levels and represents high-precision weights by low-precision indexes. To achieve the same accuracy, nonuniform quantized DNNs (NUQ-DNNs) with unequal quantization intervals need lower index precision than uniform quantized DNNs (UQ-DNNs) with equal intervals, achieving smaller model sizes. Hence, deploying NUQ-DNNs on accelerators costs less on- and off-chip memory accesses than UQ-DNNs, which are more valuable for edge devices. However, accelerating NUQ-DNNs is nontrivial, since weight indexes cannot be directly used for computations. Previous NUQ-DNN accelerators adopt standard convolutions by decoding weight indexes into actual-weights multiplied with activations, causing abundant look-up overhead and redundant computations. In this work, we propose a weight-repetition-aware activation aggregating (WPAA) convolution approach to accelerate inference of variable-precision NUQ- and UQ-DNNs. By merging convolutions of multiple kernels, WPAA requires no look-up operation and removes redundant computations. Based on WPAA, we design a generic quantized DNN accelerator (GQNA). Furthermore, we propose a layer-adaptive kernel-reordering merging scheme to off-line adjust merging order of kernels for minimizing energy consumption of GQNA. Implemented under TSMC 28-nm technology, GQNA achieves 31.9 and 32.6 TOPS/W energy efficiency for 1-b UQ- and NUQ-VGG-16, respectively.