CONVOLUTION LAYER PROCESSOR AND METHOD

A convolution layer processor for a neural network accelerator includes a memory access module to access elements of an input feature map having a first array of pixels and a plurality of convolution modules. Each convolution module receives an element of the input feature map and performs a convolution operation on the received element of the input feature map with a convolution kernel having a second array of pixels to provide a corresponding element of an output feature map. The memory access module includes a DMA requester to request elements of the input feature map, a data buffer to provide the requested elements to each of the plurality of convolution modules, and a pad supervisor module to provide to the data buffer, for each element requested by the DMA requester, padding pixels of the input feature map when the requested element extends beyond a boundary of the input feature map.