Accelerating AI Applications Using Custom RISC-V based SIMD/VLIW DSPs

The revolution in AI triggers an increased awareness for application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIPs). These processors implement a specialized instruction-set architecture (ISA) tailored to the AI application domain, often starting from a baseline such as the RISC-V ISA.  ASIPs can replace traditional fixed-function hardware accelerators, thereby introducing software-programmability in the AI acceleration domain, and thus more flexibility and agility in both the design process and the eventual product.  By maintaining a RISC-V ISA baseline, compatibility with and reuse of existing processor ecosystem elements is facilitated.

Synopsys ASIP Designer is the industry-leading tool to design, implement, program and verify application-specific instruction-set processors. Starting from a single processor specification, designers immediately obtain an optimizing C/C++ compiler, cycle-accurate simulator and synthesizable hardware implementation of the ASIP.  Using a unique compiler-in-the-loop™ and synthesis-in-the-loop™ methodology, the ISA and microarchitecture can be tuned quickly to the application domain.

This seminar introduces you to the ASIP Designer tool-suite. It features a tutorial and two case studies from AI application domains. The tutorial introduces the typical architectural features needed to accelerate AI algorithms, such as specialization, SIMD, and VLIW, and how ASIP Designer supports them. The first case study demonstrates a SIMD/VLIW architecture with a RISC-V baseline processor for accelerating activation functions. The second case study shows a RISC-V based ASIP for medium-throughput convolutional neural networks (CNN) with programming support for TensorFlowLite for Microcontrollers (TFLM).