A Survey of Stochastic Computing in Energy-Efficient DNNs On-Edge

In recent years, "edge intelligent computing power deployment" has become a key and difficult problem in key areas such as system structure and artificial intelligence. Some independent decision-making scenario requires the edge devices to have the ability to handle high energy efficient and high throughput tasks. However, restricted by the traditional accurate computing mode and memory-computation separation structure, the edge devices often fail to provide the computing power guarantee of high throughput and high energy efficiency, which seriously hinders the edge intelligent deployment. This paper summarizes the new computing model integrating memory and computation of deploying stochastic circuits around memory, and constructs an edge intelligent system taking stochastic computing as a core from three levels of microstructure of circuit, architecture of near-memory stochastic computing and system-level software/hardware co-optimization. It strives to break through the power consumption and performant bottleneck of traditional computing model, and greatly improves the deploying ability of complex intelligent computing on edge equipment.