A 1.15 TOPS/W Energy-Efficient Capsule Network Accelerator for Real-Time 3D Point Cloud Segmentation in Mobile Environment

Abstract

An energy-efficient capsule network accelerator is proposed for real-time 3D point cloud segmentation in mobile devices. The proposed accelerator adopts the pipelined heterogeneous core architecture to achieve 1.55x throughput enhancement. Furthermore, the proposed dynamic route skipping controller predicts unimportant operations and skips them to reduce the external memory access by 39.1%. At last, the new squash activation function unit exploits the look-up table (LUT) based computing with L2-norm approximation to minimize the power and area overhead. The proposed architecture is implemented with the FPGA, Altera Cyclone V 5CEBA9F31C7 and we test capsule network-based 3D point cloud segmentation application. It consumes 2.15 W power and shows 0.05 TOPS/W energy-efficiency. Also, the architecture is simulated with the 65nm CMOS technology, showing 94.3mW power consumption and 1.15 TOPS/W energy-efficiency.