Ultra-low Power DNN Accelerators for IoT: Resource Characterization of the MAX78000
13 October 2022
The development of edge devices with dedicated hardware accelerators has pushed the deployment and inference of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models closer to users and real-world sensory systems than ever before (e.g., wearables, IoT). Recently, a further subset of these devices has emerged: ultra-low power DNN accelerators. These microcontrollers possess a dedicated hardware accelerator and are able to operate with only uJ's of energy in milliseconds of time. With their small form factor, such devices could be used for battery-powered machine learning (ML) applications. In this work, we take a close look at one such device: the MAX78000 by Maxim Integrated. We characterize the device's performance by running five DNN models of various sizes and architectures, and analyze its operational latency, power consumption, and memory footprint. To better understand the performance characteristics, we take a step further and investigate how different layer types (operation type, kernel size, number of input and output channels) and the selection of accelerator processors affect the execution time.
