{"ID":2887363,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01800","arxiv_id":"2508.01800","title":"MARVEL: An End-to-End Framework for Generating Model-Class Aware Custom RISC-V Extensions for Lightweight AI","abstract":"Deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on resource-constrained IoT devices remains a challenging problem, often requiring hardware modifications tailored to individual AI models. Existing accelerator-generation tools, such as AMD's FINN, do not adequately address extreme resource limitations faced by IoT endpoints operating in bare-metal environments without an operating system (OS). To overcome these constraints, we propose MARVEL-an automated, end-to-end framework that generates custom RISC-V ISA extensions tailored to specific DNN model classes, with a primary focus on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The proposed method profiles high-level DNN representations in Python and generates an ISA-extended RISC-V core with associated compiler tools for efficient deployment. The flow leverages (1) Apache TVM for translating high-level Python-based DNN models into optimized C code, (2) Synopsys ASIP Designer for identifying compute-intensive kernels, modeling, and generating a custom RISC-V and (3) Xilinx Vivado for FPGA implementation. Beyond a model class specific RISC-V, our approach produces an optimized bare-metal C implementation, eliminating the need for an OS or extensive software dependencies. Unlike conventional deployment pipelines relying on TensorFlow/PyTorch runtimes, our solution enables seamless execution in highly resource-constrained environments. We evaluated the flow on popular DNN models such as LeNet-5*, MobileNetV1, ResNet50, VGG16, MobileNetV2 and DenseNet121 using the Synopsys trv32p3 RISC-V core as a baseline. Results show a 2x speedup in inference and upto 2x reduction in energy per inference at a 28.23% area overhead when implemented on an AMD Zynq UltraScale+ ZCU104 FPGA platform.","short_abstract":"Deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on resource-constrained IoT devices remains a challenging problem, often requiring hardware modifications tailored to individual AI models. Existing accelerator-generation tools, such as AMD's FINN, do not adequately address extreme resource limitations faced by IoT endpoints opera...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01800","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01800v1","authors":"[\"Ajay Kumar M\",\"Cian O'Mahoney\",\"Pedro Kreutz Werle\",\"Shreejith Shanker\",\"Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos\",\"Bo Ji\",\"Hans Vandierendonck\",\"Deepu John\"]","published":"2025-08-03T15:33:17Z","proceeding":"cs.AR","tasks":"[\"cs.AR\"]","methods":"[\"Convolutional Neural Network\"]","has_code":false}