Best practices for the deployment of edge inference: the conclusions to start designing

Abstract

The number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) designs is rapidly increasing and certain concerns are raised on how to start an AI design for edge systems, what are the steps to follow and what are the critical pieces towards the most optimal performance. The complete development flow undergoes two distinct phases; training and inference. During training, all the weights are calculated through optimization and back propagation of the network. The training phase is executed with the use of 32-bit floating point arithmetic as this is the convenient format for GPU platforms. The inference phase on the other hand, uses a trained network with new data. The sensitive optimization and back propagation phases are removed and forward propagation is only used. A much lower bit-width and fixed point arithmetic is used aiming a good result with reduced footprint and power consumption. This study follows the survey based process and it is aimed to provide answers such as to clarify all AI edge hardware design aspects from the concept to the final implementation and evaluation. The technology as frameworks and procedures are presented to the order of execution for a complete design cycle with guaranteed success.