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In this work, we leverage the uni-polar switching behavior of Spin-Orbit Torque Magnetic Random Access Memory (SOT-MRAM) to develop an efficient digital Computing-in-Memory (CiM) platform named XOR-CiM. XOR-CiM converts typical MRAM sub-arrays to massively parallel computational cores with ultra-high bandwidth, greatly reducing energy consumption dealing with convolutional layers and accelerating X(N)OR-intensive Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) inference. With a similar inference accuracy to digital CiMs, XOR-CiM achieves ∼4.5× and 1.8× higher energy-efficiency and speed-up compared to the recent MRAM-based CiM platforms.
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A Near-Sensor Processing Accelerator for Approximate Local Binary Pattern Networks
In this work, a high-speed and energy-efficient comparator-based N ear- S ensor L ocal B inary P attern accelerator architecture (NS-LBP) is proposed to execute a novel local binary pattern deep neural network. First, inspired by recent LBP networks, we design an approximate, hardware-oriented, and multiply-accumulate (MAC)-free network named Ap-LBP for efficient feature extraction, further reducing the computation complexity. Then, we develop NS-LBP as a processing-in-SRAM unit and a parallel in-memory LBP algorithm to process images near the sensor in a cache, remarkably reducing the power consumption of data transmission to an off-chip processor. Our circuit-to-application co-simulation results on MNIST and SVHN datasets demonstrate minor accuracy degradation compared to baseline CNN and LBP-network models, while NS-LBP achieves 1.25 GHz and an energy-efficiency of 37.4 TOPS/W. NS-LBP reduces energy consumption by 2.2× and execution time by a factor of 4× compared to the best recent LBP-based networks.
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- PAR ID:
- 10427746
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing
- ISSN:
- 2376-4562
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 11
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TETC.2023.3285493
