A Novel Configurable High-precision and Low-cost Circuit Design of Sigmoid and Tanh Activation Function
Feng Liu, Bowen Zhang, Gang Chen, Guoliang Gong, Huaxiang Lu, Wenchang Li · 2021 IEEE International Conference on Integrated Circuits, Technologies and Applications (ICTA) · 2021
This paper proposes a configurable Sigmoid and Tanh activation function circuit design by second-order approximation and deviation compensation. The proposed circuit is synthesized in TSMC 180nm technology within a 7218 um2area at 500MHz, it is also deployed on Xilinx ZC706 FPGA by 158 LUTs and 46 FFs at 333MHz. It achieves almost 4.68× better precision and 20.2% less area than previous works. The experimental results show that our method has almost no accuracy loss on LSTM Chinese speech recognition tasks and the YOLOv3 image recognition post-processing task.