Recent Developments in Low-Power AI Accelerators: A Survey

Abstract

As machine learning and AI continue to rapidly develop, and with the ever-closer end of Moore’s law, new avenues and novel ideas in architecture design are being created and utilized. One avenue is accelerating AI as close to the user as possible, i.e., at the edge, to reduce latency and increase performance. Therefore, researchers have developed low-power AI accelerators, designed specifically to accelerate machine learning and AI at edge devices. In this paper, we present an overview of low-power AI accelerators between 2019–2022. Low-power AI accelerators are defined in this paper based on their acceleration target and power consumption. In this survey, 79 low-power AI accelerators are presented and discussed. The reviewed accelerators are discussed based on five criteria: (i) power, performance, and power efficiency, (ii) acceleration targets, (iii) arithmetic precision, (iv) neuromorphic accelerators, and (v) industry vs. academic accelerators. CNNs and DNNs are the most popular accelerator targets, while Transformers and SNNs are on the rise.