Soft Error Mitigation for Deep Convolution Neural Network on FPGA Accelerators

Convolution neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used in many applications. Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based accelerator is an ideal solution for CNNs in embedded systems. However, the single event upset (SEU) effect in FPGA device may have a significant influence on the performance of CNNs. In this paper, we analyze the sensibility of CNNs to SEU and present a fault-tolerant design for CNN accelerators. First, we find that SEU in processing elements (PEs) has the worst effects on CNNs since it produces proportional errors and will not get refreshed. Furthermore, it is indicated that the large positive perturbation contributes almost all of the performance loss. Based on such observations, we propose an error detecting scheme to locate incorrect PEs and give an error masking method to achieve fault-tolerance. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves similar fault-tolerant performance with the triple modular redundancy (TMR) scheme while the overhead is much lower than it.