SPARX: Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration with Edge RISC-V SoC

Edge-AI systems increasingly require real-time CNN inference under strict energy, performance, security, and privacy constraints. Approximate computing improves hardware efficiency by exploiting the error resilience of neural network workloads; however, most approximate CNN accelerators do not jointly consider secure, privacy-aware edge deployment. This paper presents SPARX, a Secure and Privacy-Aware Approximate CNN Acceleration framework integrated within a heterogeneous RV32IMC RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC). SPARX combines a custom RISC-V instruction extension, an approximate logarithmic CNN acceleration unit, a lightweight differential-noise-based privacy engine, and a challenge-response authentication mechanism. To guide arithmetic selection, an approximation-aware decision framework is introduced that uses the Approximation Severity Index (ASI), Approximation Efficiency (AE), Quality of Approximation (QoA), Approximation Figure-of-Merit (AFOM), and Hardware Acceleration Efficiency (HAE). Evaluation across 11 state-of-the-art approximate MAC architectures identifies the Iterative Logarithmic Multiplier (ILM) as the most suitable design, achieving 51.7% area reduction, 81.5% power reduction, and 2.13x throughput improvement compared with an accurate radix-4 Booth MAC, while only reducing ResNet-20/CIFAR-10 accuracy by 2.82 percentage points. FPGA implementation on a Xilinx VC707 platform achieves 58.4 GOPS/W energy efficiency at 250 MHz, while 28-nm CMOS physical implementation validates ASIC feasibility

FERMI-ML: A Flexible and Resource-Efficient Memory-In-Situ SRAM Macro for TinyML acceleration

The growing demand for low-power and area-efficient TinyML inference on AIoT devices necessitates memory architectures that minimise data movement while sustaining high computational efficiency. This paper presents FERMI-ML, a Flexible and Resource-Efficient Memory-In-Situ (MIS) SRAM macro designed for TinyML acceleration. The proposed 9T XNOR-based RX9T bit-cell integrates a 5T storage cell with a 4T XNOR compute unit, enabling variable-precision MAC and CAM operations within the same array. A 22-transistor (C22T) compressor-tree-based accumulator facilitates logarithmic 1-64-bit MAC computation with reduced delay and power compared to conventional adder trees. The 4 KB macro achieves dual functionality for in-situ computation and CAM-based lookup operations, supporting Posit-4 or FP-4 precision. Post-layout results at 65 nm show operation at 350 MHz with 0.9 V, delivering a throughput of 1.93 TOPS and an energy efficiency of 364 TOPS/W, while maintaining a Quality-of-Result (QoR) above 97.5% with InceptionV4 and ResNet-18. FERMI-ML thus demonstrates a compact, reconfigurable, and energy-aware digital Memory-In-Situ macro capable of supporting mixed-precision TinyML workloads.

Res-DPU: Resource-shared Digital Processing-in-memory Unit for Edge-AI Workloads

Processing-in-memory (PIM) has emerged as the go to solution for addressing the von Neumann bottleneck in edge AI accelerators. However, state-of-the-art (SoTA) digital PIM approaches suffer from low compute density, primarily due to the use of bulky bit cells and transistor-heavy adder trees, which impose limitations on macro scalability and energy efficiency. This work introduces Res-DPU, a resource-shared digital PIM unit, with a dual-port 5T SRAM latch and shared 2T AND compute logic. This reflects the per-bit multiplication cost to just 5.25T and reduced the transistor count of the PIM array by up to 56% over the SoTA works. Furthermore, a Transistor-Reduced 2D Interspersed Adder Tree (TRAIT) with FA-7T and PG-FA-26T helps reduce the power consumption of the adder tree by up to 21.35% and leads to improved energy efficiency by 59% compared to conventional 28T RCA designs. We propose a Cycle-controlled Iterative Approximate-Accurate Multiplication (CIA2M) approach, enabling run-time accuracy-latency trade-offs without requiring error-correction circuitry. The 16 KB REP-DPIM macro achieves 0.43 TOPS throughput and 87.22 TOPS/W energy efficiency in TSMC 65nm CMOS, with 96.85% QoR for ResNet-18 or VGG-16 on CIFAR-10, including 30% pruning. The proposed results establish a Res-DPU module for highly scalable and energy-efficient real-time edge AI accelerators.