A Heterogeneous Processor Design for CNN-Based AI Applications on IoT Devices
Zhi-Qiang Liu, Jingfei Jiang, Guoqing Lei, Kai Chen, Buyue Qin, Xiaoqiang Zhao · Procedia Computer Science · 2020
This paper proposes a heterogeneous processor design for CNN-based AI applications on IoT devices. The heterogeneous processor contains an embedded RISC-V CPU that works as a general processor and an efficient CNN-accelerator that supports a variety of CNN models with a list of macro instructions. For demonstration, we implement a prototype on an FPGA platform with the RISC-V CPU working under 20 MHz and the CNN accelerator working under 100 MHz. As a case study, we run a CNN-based face detection and recognition application on this prototype. The prototype can process one image in 0.72 seconds and an ASIC implementation working under 400 MHz can process one image in less than 0.15 seconds by estimation, which can satisfy the needs for many IoT scenarios such as access control systems and check-in systems.