Frequency-domain intrachip communication schemes for CNN

A frequency-domain scheme to share a communications channel among the cells of a CNN is proposed. The scheme is based on a modification of the wave-parallel-computing technique and addresses the problem of reducing the number of communication links. Reduction in the communication paths is achieved by frequency multiplexing. This makes it possible to have simultaneous full-parallel access to all the cells of the array. The approach also takes advantage of the parallelism inherent in wave-parallel-computing to solve part of the state equation within the same channel during a transmission operation. Moreover, with this architecture, the CNN array is not required to have a physical matrix array of cells, providing in this form even more flexibility for the hardware implementation. A system level simulation was done and operating ranges were found as an aid to propose a final system architecture of a tentative VLSI IC.