Power Efficient Tiny Yolo CNN Using Reduced Hardware Resources Based on Booth Multiplier and WALLACE Tree Adders

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has attained high accuracy and it has been widely employed in image recognition tasks. In recent times, deep learning-based modern applications are evolving and it poses a challenge in research and development of hardware implementation. Therefore, hardware optimization for efficient accelerator design of CNN remains a challenging task. A key component of the accelerator design is a processing element (PE) that implements the convolution operation. To reduce the amount of hardware resources and power consumption, this article provides a new processing element design as an alternate solution for hardware implementation. Modified BOOTH encoding (MBE) multiplier and WALLACE tree-based adders are proposed to replace bulky MAC units and typical adder tree respectively. The proposed CNN accelerator design is tested on Zynq-706 FPGA board which achieves a throughput of 87.03 GOP/s for Tiny-YOLO-v2 architecture. The proposed design allows to reduce hardware costs by 24.5% achieving a power efficiency of 61.64 GOP/s/W that outperforms the previous designs