Brain-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) replace the multiply-accumulate operations of traditional neural networks by integrate-and-fire neurons, with the goal of achieving greater energy efficiency. Specialized hardware implementations of those neurons clearly have advantages over general-purpose devices in terms of power and performance, but exhibit poor scalability when it comes to accelerating large neural networks. DeepFire2 introduces a hardware architecture which can map large network layers efficiently across multiple super logic regions in a multi-die FPGA. That gives more control over resource allocation and parallelism, benefiting both throughput and energy consumption. Avoiding the use of lookup tables to implement the AND operations of an SNN, prevents the layer size to be limited by logic resources. A deep pipeline does not only lead to an increased clock speed of up to 600 MHz. We double the throughput and power efficiency compared to our previous version of DeepFire, which equates to an almost 10-fold improvement over other previous implementations. Importantly, we are able to deploy a large ImageNet model, while maintaining a throughput of over 1500 frames per second.

DeepFire2是一种新型的硬件架构，能够在多个逻辑区域上高效地映射大型网络层，大大提高了吞吐量和能源利用率，同时避免了查找表对SNN逻辑资源的限制，能够部署大型的ImageNet模型，保持每秒超过1500帧的吞吐量。

DeepFire2：一种基于FPGAs的卷积脉冲神经网络加速器