A Survey of Design and Optimization for Systolic Array-based DNN Accelerators

Abstract

In recent years, it has been witnessed that the systolic array is a successful architecture for DNN hardware accelerators. However, the design of systolic arrays also encountered many challenges. As DNN structures and applications become more complex, a DNN hardware accelerator based on the typical systolic array architecture suffers severe performance and efficiency penalties. So, it has motivated a significant amount of research on the redesign and optimization of the systolic array architecture. In this article, we survey these works on analyzing, redesigning, and improving the performance and efficiency of the systolic array architecture. These works are critical to the design flow of DNN accelerators based on systolic arrays. We also provide a technique classification of these works on the basis of their main research idea. Further, we attempt to compare the advantages and disadvantages of different designs and different technologies and provide quantitative results for reference. The aim of this survey is to provide researchers with knowledge of the state-of-the-art in the systolic array architecture and motivate them to design highly efficient DNN accelerators of tomorrow.