HBCA: A Toolchain for High-Accuracy Branch-Fused CNN Accelerator on FPGA with Dual-Decimal-Fused Technique

The programmability of FPGA suits the constantly changing convolutional neural network (CNN). However, several challenges arise when the previous FPGA-based accelerators update CNN. Firstly, although the model of RepVGG can balance accuracy and speed, it solely supports two types of kernels. Meanwhile, 8-bit integer-only quantization of PyTorch which can support various CNNs is seldom successfully supported by the FPGA-based accelerators. In addition, Winograd F(4 x 4, 3 x 3) uses less multiplication, but its transformation matrix contains irregular decimals, which could lead to accuracy problems. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes High-accuracy Branch-fused CNN Accelerator (HBCA): a toolchain and corresponding FPGA-based accelerator. The toolchain proposes inception-based branch-fused technique, which can support more types of kernels. Meanwhile, the accelerator proposes Winograd-quantization dual decimal-fuse techniques to balance accuracy and speed. In addition, this accelerator supports multi-types of kernels and proposes Winograd decomposed-part reuse, multi-mode BRAM & DSP and data reuse to increase power efficiency. Experiments show that HBCA is capable of supporting seven CNNs with different types of kernels and more branches. The accuracy loss is within 0.1% when compared to the quantized model. Furthermore, the power efficiency (GOPS/W) of Inception, ResNet and VGG is up to 226.6, 188.1 and 197.7, which are better than other FPGA-based CNN accelerators.