A 28nm 0.22{\mu}J/token memory-compute-intensity-aware CNN-Transformer accelerator with hybrid-attention-based layer-fusion and cascaded pruning for semantic-segmentation

This work presents a 28nm 13.93mm2 CNN-Transformer accelerator for semantic segmentation, achieving 3.86-to-10.91x energy reduction over previous designs. It features a hybrid attention unit, layer-fusion scheduler, and cascaded feature-map pruner, with peak energy efficiency of 52.90TOPS/W (INT8).

Pingcheng Dong, Yonghao Tan, Xuejiao Liu, Peng Luo, Yu Liu, Luhong Liang, Yitong Zhou, Di Pang, Man-To Yung, Dong Zhang, Xijie Huang, Shih-Yang Liu, Yongkun Wu, Fengshi Tian, Chi-Ying Tsui, Fengbin Tu, Kwang-Ting Cheng · 2025