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DIMC: 2219TOPS/W 2569F2/b Digital In-Memory Computing Macro in 28nm Based on Approximate Arithmetic Hardware
In-memory-computing (IMC) SRAM architecture has gained significant attention as it achieves high energy efficiency for computing a convolutional neural network (CNN) model [1]. Recent works investigated the use of analog-mixed-signal (AMS) hardware for high area and energy efficiency [2], [3]. However, AMS hardware output is well known to be susceptible to process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations, limiting the computing precision and ultimately the inference accuracy of a CNN. We reconfirmed, through the simulation of a capacitor-based IMC SRAM macro that computes a 256D binary dot product, that the AMS computing hardware has a significant root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 22.5% across the worst-case voltage, temperature (Fig. 16.1.1 top left) and 3-sigma process variations (Fig. 16.1.1 top right). On the other hand, we can implement an IMC SRAM macro using robust digital logic [4], which can virtually eliminate the variability issue (Fig. 16.1.1 top). However, digital circuits require more devices than AMS counterparts (e.g., 28 transistors for a mirror full adder [FA]). As a result, a recent digital IMC SRAM shows a lower area efficiency of 6368F2/b (22nm, 4b/4b weight/activation) [5] than the AMS counterpart (1170F2/b, 65nm, 1b/1b) [3]. In light of this, we aim to adopt approximate arithmetic hardware to more »
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NSF-PAR ID:
10342205
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2022 IEEE International Solid- State Circuits Conference (ISSCC)
Page Range or eLocation-ID:
266 to 268
National Science Foundation
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1. This article presents C3SRAM, an in-memory-computing SRAM macro. The macro is an SRAM module with the circuits embedded in bitcells and peripherals to perform hardware acceleration for neural networks with binarized weights and activations. The macro utilizes analog-mixed-signal (AMS) capacitive-coupling computing to evaluate the main computations of binary neural networks, binary-multiply-and-accumulate operations. Without the need to access the stored weights by individual row, the macro asserts all its rows simultaneously and forms an analog voltage at the read bitline node through capacitive voltage division. With one analog-to-digital converter (ADC) per column, the macro realizes fully parallel vector–matrix multiplication in a single cycle. The network type that the macro supports and the computing mechanism it utilizes are determined by the robustness and error tolerance necessary in AMS computing. The C3SRAM macro is prototyped in a 65-nm CMOS. It demonstrates an energy efficiency of 672 TOPS/W and a speed of 1638 GOPS (20.2 TOPS/mm 2 ), achieving 3975 × better energy–delay product than the conventional digital baseline performing the same operation. The macro achieves 98.3% accuracy for MNIST and 85.5% for CIFAR-10, which is among the best in-memory computing works in terms of energy efficiency and inference accuracy tradeoff.
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