Content addressable memory based binarized neural network accelerator using time-domain signal processing

Binarized neural network (BNN) is one of the most promising solution for low-cost convolutional neural network acceleration. Since BNN is based on binarized bit-level operations, there exist great opportunities to reduce power-hungry data transfers and complex arithmetic operations. In this paper, we propose a content addressable memory (CAM) based BNN accelerator. By using time-domain signal processing, the huge convolution operations of BNN can be effectively replaced to the CAM search operation. In addition, thanks to fully parallel search of CAM, the parallel convolution operations for non-overlapped filtering window is enabled for high throughput data processing. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed CAM based BNN accelerator, the convolutional layer of LeNet-5 model has been implemented using 65nm CMOS technology. The implementation results show that the proposed BNN accelerator achieves 9.4% and 38.5% of area and energy savings, respectively. The parallel convolution operation of the proposed approach also shows 2.4x improved processing time.