The invention provides an apparatus and method for realizing an accelerator of a sparse
convolutional neural network. According to the invention, the apparatus herein includes a convolutional and
pooling unit, a full connection unit and a
control unit. The method includes the following steps: on the basis of control information, reading convolutional parameter information, and input data and intermediate computing data, and reading full connected layer weight matrix position information, in accordance with the convolutional parameter information, conducting
convolution and
pooling on the input data with first iteration times, then on the basis of the full connected layer weight matrix position information, conducting full connection computing with second iteration times. Each input data is divided into a plurality of sub-blocks, and the convolutional and
pooling unit and the full connection unit separately operate on the plurality of sub-blocks in parallel. According to the invention, the apparatus herein uses a specific circuit, supports a full connected layer sparse
convolutional neural network, uses parallel ping-pang
buffer design and
assembly line design, effectively balances I / O
broadband and computing efficiency, and acquires better performance
power consumption ratio.