FINN

FINN is an experimental framework from Xilinx Research Labs to explore deep neural network inference on FPGAs. It specifically targets quantized neural networks, with emphasis on generating dataflow-style architectures customized for each network. It is not intended to be a generic DNN accelerator offering like Vitis AI, but rather a tool for exploring the design space of DNN inference accelerators on FPGAs.

A new, more modular version of the FINN compiler is currently under development on GitHub, and we welcome contributions from the community!

Quickstart

Depending on what you would like to do, we have different suggestions on where to get started:

• I want to try out prebuilt QNN accelerators on my FPGA board. Head over to finn-examples to try out some FPGA accelerators built with the FINN compiler. We have more examples in the BNN-PYNQ and the LSTM-PYNQ repos, although these are not built with the FINN compiler.
• I want to train new quantized networks for FINN. Check out Brevitas, our PyTorch library for quantization-aware training.
• I want to understand the computations involved in quantized inference. Check out these Jupyter notebooks on QNN inference. This repo contains simple Numpy/Python layer implementations and a few pretrained QNNs for instructive purposes.
• I want to understand how it all fits together. Check out our publications, particularly the FINN paper at FPGA’17 and the FINN-R paper in ACM TRETS.