In the past decade, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in various Artificial Intelligence tasks. To accelerate the experimentation and development of CNNs, several software frameworks have been released, primarily targeting power-hungry CPUs and GPUs. In this context, reconfigurable hardware in the form of FPGAs constitutes a potential alternative platform that can be integrated in the existing deep learning ecosystem to provide a tunable balance between performance, power consumption and programmability. In this paper, a survey of the existing CNN-to-FPGA toolflows is presented, comprising a comparative study of their key characteristics which include the supported applications, architectural choices, design space exploration methods and achieved performance. Moreover, major challenges and objectives introduced by the latest trends in CNN algorithmic research are identified and presented. Finally, a uniform evaluation methodology is proposed, aiming at the comprehensive, complete and in-depth evaluation of CNN-to-FPGA toolflows.

本文综述了现有的CNN-to-FPGA工具流，包括应用支持、架构选择、设计空间探索方法和性能等关键特性的比较研究，提出了最新CNN算法研究引入的主要挑战和目标，并提出了一种统一的评估方法，旨在全面、完整和深入地评估CNN-to-FPGA工具流。

用于在FPGAs上映射卷积神经网络的工具流：调查和未来方向