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Deep Microcompression: Structured Pruning and Bit-packed Quantization for Microcontrollers

Sep 2026 · 1 citation · 21 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

Deep Microcompression enables the first documented deployment of a standard CNN on the ATmega328P, a device constrained to 2KB SRAM, previously considered infeasible for CNN inference.

Abstract

This paper introduces Deep Microcompression (DMC), a hardware-aware pipeline for deep learning inference on bare-metal microcontrollers. DMC integrates structured pruning, quantization-aware training, and fixed-length bit-packing to achieve a 55.8$\times$ weight compression ratio on LeNet-5 (98.77\% accuracy), generating a dependency-free C library with deterministic latency. On the RP2040 (Cortex-M0+), DMC reduces binary size by 3$\times$ versus TensorFlow Lite while matching its accuracy. Critically, DMC enables the first documented deployment of a standard CNN on the ATmega328P, a device constrained to 2KB SRAM, previously considered infeasible for CNN inference.

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