Neuromorphic Chiplet Architecture for Wide Area Motion Imagery Processing

Abstract

We present the system architecture for real-time processing of data that originates in large format tiled imaging arrays used in wide area motion imagery ubiquitous surveillance. High performance and high throughput is achieved through approximate computing and fixed point variable precision (6 bits to 18 bits) arithmetic. The architecture implements a variety of processing algorithms in what we consider today as Third Wave AI and Machine Intelligence ranging from convolutional networks (CNNs) to linear and non-linear morphological processing, probabilistic inference using exact and approximate Bayesian methods and Deep Neural Networks based classification. The processing pipeline is implemented entirely using event based neuromorphic and stochastic computational primitives. An emulation of the system architecture demonstrated processing in real-time 160 x 120 raw pixel data running on a reconfigurable computing platform (5 Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGAs). The reconfigurable computing implementation was developed to emulate the computational structures for a 2.5D System chiplet design, that was fabricated in the 55nm GF CMOS technology. To optimize for energy efficiency of a mixed level system, a general energy aware methodology is applied through the design process at all levels from algorithms and architecture all the way down to technology and devices, while at the same time keeping the operational requirements and specifications for the task at focus.