Invention Grant
- Patent Title: Computation method and apparatus exploiting weight sparsity
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Application No.: US16781868Application Date: 2020-02-04
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Publication No.: US11526328B2Publication Date: 2022-12-13
- Inventor: Hung-Sheng Chang , Han-Wen Hu , Hsiang-Pang Li , Tzu-Hsien Yang , I-Ching Tseng , Hsiang-Yun Cheng , Chia-Lin Yang
- Applicant: MACRONIX International Co., Ltd.
- Applicant Address: TW Hsinchu
- Assignee: MACRONIX International Co., Ltd.
- Current Assignee: MACRONIX International Co., Ltd.
- Current Assignee Address: TW Hsinchu
- Agency: J.C. Patents
- Main IPC: G06F7/544
- IPC: G06F7/544 ; G06N3/04 ; G11C13/00

Abstract:
A computation method and a computation apparatus exploiting weight sparsity, adapted for a processor to perform multiply-and-accumulate operations on a memory including multiple input and output lines crossing each other. In the method, weights are mapped to the cells of each operation unit (OU) in the memory. The rows of the cells of each OU are compressed by removing at least one row of the cells each mapped with a weight of 0, and an index including values each indicating a distance between every two rows of the cells including at least one cell mapped with a non-zero weight for each OU is encoded. Inputs are inputted to the input lines corresponding to the rows of each OU excluding the rows of the cells with the weight of 0 according to the index and outputs are sensed from the output lines corresponding to the OU to compute a computation result.
Public/Granted literature
- US20210240443A1 COMPUTATION METHOD AND APPARATUS EXPLOITING WEIGHT SPARSITY Public/Granted day:2021-08-05
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