Channel Augmentation - 3.4 English

Channel augmentation is an optional feature for improving the efficiency of the DPUCZDX8G when the number of input channels is much lower than the available channel parallelism. For example, the input channel of the first layer in most CNNs is three, which does not fully use all the available hardware channels. If the number of input channels is larger than the channel parallelism, channel augmentation can still be utilized.

Thus, channel augmentation can improve the total efficiency for most CNNs, but it will cost extra logic resources. The following table illustrates the extra LUT resources used with channel augmentation and the statistics are for reference.