Laser & Optoelectronics Progress, Volume. 59, Issue 2, 0214001(2022)

A Configurable BP Neural Network Accelerator for Laser Welding Parameter Calculation

Boyu Fan1、*, Zaifeng Shi1,3、**, Zhe Wang1, Shaoxiong Li1, and Tao Luo2
Author Affiliations
  • 1School of Microelectronics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
  • 2College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
  • 3Tianjin Key Laboratory of Microelectronic Technology for Imaging and Sensing, Tianjin 300072, China
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    Artificial neural networks are widely used in different types of laser technologies. However, traditional accelerators based on the pipeline deployment architecture cannot manage various back propagation (BP) neural networks needed for different laser calculation tasks, such as the extraction of laser welding parameters and laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy analysis. Based on the Xilinx PYNQ-Z2 development platform, a configurable accelerator architecture-based BP neural network for laser welding technologies is designed and implemented herein. By introducing the configurable accelerator architecture and the interconnection of multiplexing operation units, the hardware circuit can be fitted to various BP network structures and the accelerator shows flexible configurability. Furthermore, the data reading method based on a multilevel cache structure is adopted, which addresses the bottleneck of reading speed. Experimental results show that the proposed accelerator can efficiently accelerate the BP neural network with various types of neurons. Compared with the embedded processor platform, the typical network operation performance of the proposed accelerator improves by 10.5 times on average and the large network operation performance with more than 100 neurons improves by 56.4 times on average. The proposed accelerator is superior to the general accelerator, which is realized on the same development platform.

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    Boyu Fan, Zaifeng Shi, Zhe Wang, Shaoxiong Li, Tao Luo. A Configurable BP Neural Network Accelerator for Laser Welding Parameter Calculation[J]. Laser & Optoelectronics Progress, 2022, 59(2): 0214001

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    Paper Information

    Category: Lasers and Laser Optics

    Received: Jan. 29, 2021

    Accepted: Mar. 9, 2021

    Published Online: Dec. 23, 2021

    The Author Email: Fan Boyu (fanboyu@tju.edu.cn), Shi Zaifeng (shizaifeng@tju.edu.cn)

    DOI:10.3788/LOP202259.0214001

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