Reconfigurable Fixed Point Dense and Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiply/Add Unit

In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable hardware accelerator for fixed-point-matrix-vector-multiply/add operations, capable to work on dense and sparse matrices formats. The prototyped hardware unit accommodates 4 dense or sparse matrix inputs and performs computations in a space parallel design achieving 4 multiplications and up to 12 additions at 120 MHz over an xc2vp100-6 FPGA device, reaching a throughput of 1.9 GOPS. A total of 11 units can be integrated in the same FPGA chip, achieving a performance of 21 GOPS.