Notice and Invitation

Oral Defense of Doctoral Dissertation
The Volgenau School of Engineering, George Mason University

ALI Mirzaeian

Bachelor of Science, Isfahan University of Technology, Iran, 2012

Master of Science, Iran University of Science and Technology, 2015

A CNN/MLP Neural Processing Engine, Powered by Novel Temporal-Carry-Deferring MACs

Friday July 23, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM

Zoom Meeting Link: https://gmu.zoom.us/j/92637646611

All are invited to attend.

Committee

Dr. Avesta Sasan, Chair

Dr. Zhi Tian

Dr. Liang Zhao

Dr. Sai Manoj

Abstract:

The applications of machine learning algorithms are innumerable and cover nearly every domain of modern technology. However, as machine learning has so far required a power source with more capacity and higher efficiency than a conventional battery. Therefore, introducing neural network accelerators with low energy demands and low latency for executing machine learning techniques has  drawn lots of attention in both the academia and industry.

In this work, we first propose the design of Temporal-Carry-deferring MAC (TCD-MAC) and illustrate how our proposed solution can gain significant energy and performance benefit when utilized to process a stream of input data.  We then propose using the TCD-MAC to build a reconfigurable, high speed, and low power Neural Processing Engine (TCD-NPE). Furthermore, we expand the idea of TCD-MAC to present NESTA, which is a specialized Neural engine that reformats Convolutions into $3 \times 3$ batches and uses a hierarchy of Hamming Weight Compressors to process each batch.