US Patent 11205115 Neural network inference circuit

Some embodiments provide a neural network inference circuit (NNIC) for implementing a neural network that includes multiple computation nodes at multiple layers. Each of a set of the computation nodes includes a dot product of input values and weight values. The NNIC includes multiple dot product core circuits for computing multiple partial dot products and a set of channel circuits connecting the core circuits. The set of channel circuits includes (i) a dot product bus for aggregating the partial dot products to compute dot products for computation nodes of the neural network, (ii) one or more post-processing circuits for performing additional computation operations on the dot products to compute outputs for the computation nodes, and (iii) an output bus for providing the computed outputs of the computation nodes to the core circuits for the core circuits to use as inputs for subsequent computation nodes.