HANNA: a tool for hardware prototyping and benchmarking of ANNs. Poster

Abstract

For some applications, designers must implement an ANN model over different platforms to meet performance, cost or power constrains, a process still more painful when several hardware implementations have to be evaluated. Continuous advances in VLSI technologies, computer architecture and software development make it difficult to find the adequate implementation platform. HANNA (Hardware ANN Architect), is a tool designed to automate the generation of hardware prototypes of MLP-like neural networks over FPGA devices. Coupled with traditional Matlab/Simulink environments the model can be synthesized, downloaded to the FPGA and co-simulated with the software version to trade off area, speed and precision requirements.