Minimalist TPU Design: A Beginner's Guide to Chip Accelerator Development
2025-08-19
This article details a minimalist Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) design inspired by Google's TPU V1 and V2. The TPU features a 2x2 grid of processing elements, pipelining multiply-accumulate operations, bias addition, Leaky ReLU activation, and MSE loss calculations. Its 94-bit instruction set controls data flow horizontally and vertically across the processing element grid, supporting preprocessing and weight matrix transposition. The article thoroughly explains the instruction set, hardware architecture, and the process of adding modules and running tests, aiming to introduce readers to chip accelerator design.
Hardware
hardware accelerator