The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 22, 2020
Filed:
Sep. 19, 2019
Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute Company, Limited, Hong Kong, HK;
Abstract
A neural network accelerator reads encoded weights from memory. All 1 bits in a weight except the first three are discarded. The first three leading 1 bits in the weight are encoded as three bit-shift values to form the encoded weight. The three bit-shift values are applied to a bit shifter to shift a node input to obtain three shifted inputs that are accumulated to generate the node output. Node complexity is reduced since only 3 shifts are performed rather than up to 15 shifts for a 16-bit weight. The bit shifter and accumulator for a node can be implemented by Look-Up Tables (LUTs) without requiring a Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) cell in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Quantization bias is reduced using a histogram analyzer that determines a weighted average for each interval between quantized weights. The third bit-shift value is incremented for weights in the interval above the weighted average.