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A Real Time 1280x720 Object Detection Chip With 585MB/s Memory Traffic

Hardware Architecture 2022-05-04 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning

Abstract

Memory bandwidth has become the real-time bottleneck of current deep learning accelerators (DLA), particularly for high definition (HD) object detection. Under resource constraints, this paper proposes a low memory traffic DLA chip with joint hardware and software optimization. To maximize hardware utilization under memory bandwidth, we morph and fuse the object detection model into a group fusion-ready model to reduce intermediate data access. This reduces the YOLOv2's feature memory traffic from 2.9 GB/s to 0.15 GB/s. To support group fusion, our previous DLA based hardware employes a unified buffer with write-masking for simple layer-by-layer processing in a fusion group. When compared to our previous DLA with the same PE numbers, the chip implemented in a TSMC 40nm process supports 1280x720@30FPS object detection and consumes 7.9X less external DRAM access energy, from 2607 mJ to 327.6 mJ.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.01571,
  title  = {A Real Time 1280x720 Object Detection Chip With 585MB/s Memory Traffic},
  author = {Kuo-Wei Chang and Hsu-Tung Shih and Tian-Sheuan Chang and Shang-Hong Tsai and Chih-Chyau Yang and Chien-Ming Wu and Chun-Ming Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.01571},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

11 pages, 14 figures, to be published IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:06:01.059Z