Hardware synthesis of artificial neural networks using field programmable gate arrays and fixed-point numbers

Author(s):  
Mychal Hoffman ◽  
Paul Bauer ◽  
Brian Hemrnelman ◽  
Abul Hasan

Due to the exponential increase of electronic devices that are connected to the Internet, the amount of data that they produce have grown to the same extent. In order to face the processing of these data, the use of some automatic learning algorithms, also known as Machine Learning, has become widespread. The most popular is the one known as neural networks. These algorithms need a great deal of resources to compute all their operations, and because of that, they have been traditionally implemented in application specific integrated circuits. However, recently there have been a boom in implementations in field programmable gate arrays, also known as FPGAs. These allow greater parallelism in the implementation of the algorithms. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) implementation based feature extraction method is proposed in this paper. This particular application is handwritten offline digit recognition. The classification depends on simple 2 layer MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP). The particular feature extraction approach is suitable for execution of FPGA because it is utilized with subtraction and addition operations. From Standard database handwritten digit images of normalized 40×40 pixel the features are extracted by the proposed method. It has been discovered by experiential outcomes that 85% accuracy is achieved by proposed system. Overall, as compared to other systems, it is less complex, more accurate and simple. Further this project explains IEE-754 format single precision floating point MAC unit’s FPGA implementation which is utilized for feeding the neurons weighted inputs in artificial neural networks. Data representation range is improved by floating point numbers utilization to a higher number from smaller number that is highly suggested for Artificial Neuron Network. The code is developed in HDL, simulated and synthesis results are extracted using Xilinx synthesis tools .In order to validate its computational accuracy of the FFT, an MATLAB validation script is used to verify the output of HDL with standard reference model.


Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 1823
Author(s):  
Tomyslav Sledevič ◽  
Artūras Serackis

The convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are a computation and memory demanding class of deep neural networks. The field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are often used to accelerate the networks deployed in embedded platforms due to the high computational complexity of CNNs. In most cases, the CNNs are trained with existing deep learning frameworks and then mapped to FPGAs with specialized toolflows. In this paper, we propose a CNN core architecture called mNet2FPGA that places a trained CNN on a SoC FPGA. The processing system (PS) is responsible for convolution and fully connected core configuration according to the list of prescheduled instructions. The programmable logic holds cores of convolution and fully connected layers. The hardware architecture is based on the advanced extensible interface (AXI) stream processing with simultaneous bidirectional transfers between RAM and the CNN core. The core was tested on a cost-optimized Z-7020 FPGA with 16-bit fixed-point VGG networks. The kernel binarization and merging with the batch normalization layer were applied to reduce the number of DSPs in the multi-channel convolutional core. The convolutional core processes eight input feature maps at once and generates eight output channels of the same size and composition at 50 MHz. The core of the fully connected (FC) layer works at 100 MHz with up to 4096 neurons per layer. In a current version of the CNN core, the size of the convolutional kernel is fixed to 3×3. The estimated average performance is 8.6 GOPS for VGG13 and near 8.4 GOPS for VGG16/19 networks.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (8) ◽  
pp. 2108
Author(s):  
Mohamed Yassine Allani ◽  
Jamel Riahi ◽  
Silvano Vergura ◽  
Abdelkader Mami

The development and optimization of a hybrid system composed of photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, converters, and batteries connected to the grid, is first presented. To generate the maximum power, two maximum power point tracker controllers based on fuzzy logic are required and a battery controller is used for the regulation of the DC voltage. When the power source varies, a high-voltage supply is incorporated (high gain DC-DC converter controlled by fuzzy logic) to boost the 24 V provided by the DC bus to the inverter voltage of about 400 V and to reduce energy losses to maximize the system performance. The inverter and the LCL filter allow for the integration of this hybrid system with AC loads and the grid. Moreover, a hardware solution for the field programmable gate arrays-based implementation of the controllers is proposed. The combination of these controllers was synthesized using the Integrated Synthesis Environment Design Suite software (Version: 14.7, City: Tunis, Country: Tunisia) and was successfully implemented on Field Programmable Gate Arrays Spartan 3E. The innovative design provides a suitable architecture based on power converters and control strategies that are dedicated to the proposed hybrid system to ensure system reliability. This implementation can provide a high level of flexibility that can facilitate the upgrade of a control system by simply updating or modifying the proposed algorithm running on the field programmable gate arrays board. The simulation results, using Matlab/Simulink (Version: 2016b, City: Tunis, Country: Tunisia, verify the efficiency of the proposed solution when the environmental conditions change. This study focused on the development and optimization of an electrical system control strategy to manage the produced energy and to coordinate the performance of the hybrid energy system. The paper proposes a combined photovoltaic and wind energy system, supported by a battery acting as an energy storage system. In addition, a bi-directional converter charges/discharges the battery, while a high-voltage gain converter connects them to the DC bus. The use of a battery is useful to compensate for the mismatch between the power demanded by the load and the power generated by the hybrid energy systems. The proposed field programmable gate arrays (FPGA)-based controllers ensure a fast time response by making control executable in real time.


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