Deep Microcompression Fits a Standard CNN on the 2KB-SRAM ATmega328P for the First Time

arXiv 2609.05081·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

arXiv 2609.05081 presents DMC, a hardware-aware pipeline combining structured pruning, quantization-aware training, and fixed-length bit-packing, reaching a 55.8x weight compression ratio on LeNet-5 at 98.77% accuracy and emitting a dependency-free C library with deterministic latency. On the RP2040 (Cortex-M0+) it cuts binary size 3x versus TensorFlow Lite at matching accuracy. The headline claim is the first documented deployment of a standard CNN on the ATmega328P, a 2KB-SRAM device previously considered infeasible for CNN inference.