IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 45

Figure 12. Processing pipeline of a sparse DNN processor. Adopted from [31] ©2021 IEEE.
front end, a sufficient number of
IA-W pairs must be discovered
and sent to the compute stage in
order to maintain a high compute
utilization and 2) at the backend:
the irregular psum traffic out
of the compute stage must be
reduced and written back to the
output buffer without costing excessive
bandwidth.
We provide a high-level overview
of the hardware design
techniques and explain how they
leverage sparsity in the following
three subsections.
D. Single-Operand Sparsity
Some of the earliest sparse architectures
leveraged
sparsity
from
either IA, e.g., Cnvlutin [37],
or W, e.g., Cambricon-X [38], but
not both. By limiting the support
to single-operand sparsity, these
designs could adopt an existing
dense DNN accelerator architecture
and dataflow [39], and add
a frontend to discover IA-W pairs
for computation. Fig. 13 shows the
frontend designs for Cnvlutin [37]
and Cambricon-X [38]. Both used
indirect access to fetch dense data
(W in Cnvlutin, IA in Cambricon-X)
using the indices of nonzero data
(IA in Cnvlutin, W in Cambricon-X) decoded from the
compressed format.
Cnvlutin supports IA sparsity, where the IA data
Figure 13. Sparse architectures for single operand sparsity: (a) Cnvlutin adapted from
[37] and (b) Cambricon-X adapted from [38].
offset is used as the index to fetch W data from the W
data array.
Cambricon-X supports W sparsity, where the W
are compressed in the COO format, as illustrated in
Fig. 13(a). For each nonzero IA data, an IA offset is stored
to represent the original location of the IA data in the
uncompressed format. To discover IA-W pairs, the IA
THIRD QUARTER 2023
data are compressed in the RLC format. For each W
data, a W step index stores the number of zeros preceding
it, i.e., the run length, as shown in Fig. 13(b). To
discover IA-W pairs, the run lengths are accumulated
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
45

IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023

Contents
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - Cover1
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - Cover2
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - Contents
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 2
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 3
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 4
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 5
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 6
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 7
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 8
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 9
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 10
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 11
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 12
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 13
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 14
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 15
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 16
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 17
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 18
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 19
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 20
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 21
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 22
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 23
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 24
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 25
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 26
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 27
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 28
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 29
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 30
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 31
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 32
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 33
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 34
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 35
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 36
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 37
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 38
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 39
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 40
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 41
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 42
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 43
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 44
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 45
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 46
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 47
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 48
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 49
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 50
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 51
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 52
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 53
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 54
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 55
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 56
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 57
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 58
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 59
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 60
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 61
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 62
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 63
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 64
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 65
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 66
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 67
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 68
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 69
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 70
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 71
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 72
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 73
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 74
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 75
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 76
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 77
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 78
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 79
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 80
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 81
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 82
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 83
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 84
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 85
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 86
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 87
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - 88
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - Cover3
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2023 - Cover4
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2023Q3
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2023Q2
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2023Q1
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2022Q4
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2022Q3
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2022Q2
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2022Q1
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2021Q4
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2021q3
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2021q2
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2021q1
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2020q4
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2020q3
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2020q2
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2020q1
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2019q4
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2019q3
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2019q2
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2019q1
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2018q4
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2018q3
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2018q2
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/ieee/circuitsandsystems_2018q1
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com