Field programmable gate array architecture optimized for machine learning applications

Abstract

Systems and methods for a new field programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture that is optimized for machine learning (ML) applications are provided. Such ML applications can specifically include, for example, artificial neural networks and deep neural networks. Various embodiments enable the design of faster and more power efficient hardware accelerators for machine learning algorithms, compared to existing FPGAs in the market. This is made possible by hard systolic matrix multiplier blocks, hard activation blocks and soft ML-centric configurable logic blocks. The matrix multiplier blocks are connected to field programmable interconnect resources to enable creation of larger matrix multipliers. The hard matrix multipliers and the hard activation blocks have programmable interconnects between them and neighboring memory or compute blocks on the device.