Direct memory access operation for neural network accelerator

In one example, an apparatus comprises: a direct memory access (DMA) descriptor queue that stores DMA descriptors, each DMA descriptor including an indirect address; an address translation table that stores an address mapping between indirect addresses and physical addresses; and a DMA engine configured to: fetch a DMA descriptor from the DMA descriptor queue to the address translation table to translate a first indirect address of the DMA descriptor to a first physical address based on the address mapping, and perform a DMA operation based on executing the DMA descriptor to transfer data to or from the first physical address.