Safety Design of a Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator with Error Localization and Correction

Recently neural network accelerators have grown into prominence with significant power and performance efficiency improvements over CPU and GPU. In this paper, we proposed two safety design techniques include Algorithm Based Atomic Error Checking-1 (ABAEC-1) and ABAEC-2 for a Weight Stationary (WS) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerator focusing on low latency and low overhead error detection and correction with no performance degradation. The proposed design techniques not only detect the errors on-the-fly but also perform error diagnosis to localize the errors to a Processing Element (PE) for on-line fault management and recovery. We applied the design techniques on an industry quality CNN accelerator and demonstrated that we could achieve the required Diagnostic Coverage (DC) goal with minimal area and power overhead for selected configurations. Furthermore, we discussed methods to extend the proposed techniques to other dataflow architecture.