DIANA: An End-to-End Hybrid DIgital and ANAlog Neural Network SoC for the Edge

DIgital-ANAlog (DIANA), a heterogeneous multi-core accelerator, combines a reduced instruction set computer - five (RISC-V) host processor with an analog in-memory computing (AIMC) artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator and a digital reconfigurable deep neural network (DNN) accelerator in a single system-on-chip (SoC) to support a wide variety of neural network (NN) workloads. AIMC cores can bring extreme computational parallelism and efficiency at the expense of accuracy and dataflow flexibility. Digital AI co-processors, on the other hand, guarantee accuracy through deterministic compute, but cannot achieve the same computational density and efficiency. DIANA exploits this fundamental tradeoff by integrating both types of cores in a shared and optimized memory system, to enable seamless execution of the workloads on the parallel cores. The system’s performance benefits further from pipelined parallel execution across both accelerator cores and enhanced AIMC spatial unrolling techniques, leading to drastically reduced execution latency and reduced memory footprints. The design has been implemented in a 22-nm technology and achieves peak efficiencies of 600 TOP/s/W for the AIMC core (I/W/O: 7/1.5/6 bit) and 14 TOP/s/W (I/W/O: 8/8/8 bit) for the digital accelerator, respectively. End-to-end performance evaluation of CIFAR-10 and ImageNet classification workloads is carried out on the chip, reporting 7.02 and 5.56 TOP/s/W, respectively, at the system level.