The invention discloses a deep neural network hardware accelerator based on power exponent quantization, relates to a processor structure for deep neural network convolution calculation hardware acceleration, and belongs to the technical field of calculation, calculation and counting. The hardware accelerator comprising: an AXI-4 bus interface, an input cache region, an output cache region, a weight cache region, a weight index cache region, an encoding module, a configurable state controller module and a PE array. The input cache region and the output cache region are designed into a row cache structure; the encoder encodes the weights according to an ordered quantization set that stores absolute values of all quantized weights. when the accelerator performs calculation, the PE unit readsdata from the input cache region and the weight index cache region to perform shift calculation, and sends a calculation result to the output cache region. According to the method, floating point multiplication is replaced by shift operation, so that the requirements on computing resources, storage resources and communication bandwidth are reduced, and the computing efficiency of the acceleratoris further improved.