Impact of NCFET on Neural Network Accelerators

Autor: Georgios Zervakis, Iraklis Anagnostopoulos, Sami Salamin, Yogesh S. Chauhan, Jorg Henkel, Hussam Amrouch
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: IEEE Access, Vol 9, Pp 43748-43758 (2021)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2169-3536
DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3066335
Popis: This is the first work to investigate the impact that Negative Capacitance Field-Effect Transistor (NCFET) brings on the efficiency and accuracy of future Neural Networks (NN). NCFET is at the forefront of emerging technologies, especially after it has become compatible with the existing fabrication process of CMOS. Neural Network inference accelerators are becoming ubiquitous in modern SoCs and there is an ever-increasing demand for tighter and tighter throughput constraints and lower energy consumption. To explore the benefits that NCFET brings to NN inference regarding frequency, energy, and accuracy, we investigate different configurations of the multiply-add (MADD) circuit, which is the core computational unit in any NN accelerator. We demonstrate that, compared to the baseline 7nm FinFET technology, its negative capacitance counterpart reduces the energy by 55%, without any frequency reduction. In addition, it enables leveraging higher computational precision, which results to a considerable improvement in the inference accuracy. Importantly, the achieved accuracy improvement comes also together with a significant energy reduction and without any loss in frequency.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals