A lightweight C Code Generator for Heterogeneous TinyML Systems

Chen Liu, Bernhard Vogginger, Christian Mayr

Over the past decade, the significant advancements in artificial intelligence have been closely tied to increasingly sophisticated training frameworks and steadily powerful computing hardware. However, the entire ecosystem remains fragmented. On one hand, models are represented with frameworks dependent formats, while on the other hand, new tailored hardware for accelerating novel operators has continued to emerge. To effectively diminish the transfer costs from training to inference, we propose a lightweight C code generator designed for bare-metal heterogeneous systems that incorporate domain-specific accelerators. Through a comprehensive case study on a RISC-V based radar DSP, we demonstrate that by employing an accelerator with ahead-of-time optimizations like weight tuning and bias fusion, our approach achieves a 2.3 times improvement in inference speed and a 20% reduction in binary size compared to the microTVM flow registered with the same accelerator, thus offering another compelling choice for resource-constrained edge devices. The code is open-sourced in Gitlab.