Sparsity Based Reduction Of Gate Switching In Deep Neural Network Accelerators

Abstract: Gate switching in deep learning operations can be reduced based on sparsity in the input data. A first element of an activation operand and a first element of a weight operand may be stored in input storage units associated with a multiplier in a processing element. The multiplier computes a product of the two elements, which may be stored in an output storage unit of the multiplier. After detecting that a second element of the activation operand or a second element of the weight operand is zero valued, gate switching is reduced by avoiding at least one gate switching needed for the multiply-accumulation operation. For instance, the input storage units may not be updated. A zero-valued data element may be stored in the output storage unit of the multiplier and used as a product of the second element of the activation operand and the second element of the weight operand.

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