System and method of input alignment for efficient vector operations in an artificial neural network

An input aligner apparatus for use in an artificial neural network, comprising:

• a plurality of multibit registers arranged in linear fashion to function as a shift register;
• a first circuit operative to load said plurality of multibit registers in parallel and/or serially with data from a memory;
• a plurality of multiplexer circuits coupled to said multibit registers, said plurality of multiplexer circuits configured to expand contents of said plurality of multibit registers in accordance with a non-zero expand value whereby output data is from said expand value rather than said multibit registers;
• and
• a distribution circuit operative to output the contents of said plurality of multibit registers to appropriate processing elements in parallel simultaneously, said contents effectively re-used multiple times thereby avoiding multiple data reads from memory and reducing required memory bandwidth.

An input alignment method for use in an artificial neural network, the method comprising:

• providing a plurality of multibit registers arranged in linear fashion to function as a shift register;
• providing a plurality of multiplexer circuits coupled to said multibit registers;
• loading said plurality of multibit registers in parallel and/or serially with data from a memory utilizing said multiplexer circuits;
• shifting and/or cycling contents of said plurality of multibit registers via said multiplexer circuits in accordance with a shift command;
• skipping zero or more multibit registers in accordance with a stride value;
• and
• distributing the contents of said plurality of multibit registers to appropriate processing elements in parallel simultaneously, said contents effectively re-used multiple times thereby avoiding multiple data reads from memory and reducing required memory bandwidth.