Memristive Devices for Time Domain Compute-in-Memory

Analog compute schemes and compute-in-memory (CIM) have emerged in an effort to reduce the increasing power hunger of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which exceeds the constraints of edge devices. Memristive device types are a relatively new offering with interesting opportunities for unexplor...

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Main Authors: Florian Freye, Jie Lou, Christopher Bengel, Stephan Menzel, Stefan Wiefels, Tobias Gemmeke
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2022-01-01
Series:IEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9930136/
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author Florian Freye
Jie Lou
Christopher Bengel
Stephan Menzel
Stefan Wiefels
Tobias Gemmeke
author_facet Florian Freye
Jie Lou
Christopher Bengel
Stephan Menzel
Stefan Wiefels
Tobias Gemmeke
author_sort Florian Freye
collection DOAJ
description Analog compute schemes and compute-in-memory (CIM) have emerged in an effort to reduce the increasing power hunger of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which exceeds the constraints of edge devices. Memristive device types are a relatively new offering with interesting opportunities for unexplored circuit concepts. In this work, the use of memristive devices in cascaded time-domain CIM (TDCIM) is introduced with the primary goal of reducing the size of fully unrolled architectures. The different effects influencing the determinism in memristive devices are outlined together with reliability concerns. Architectures for binary as well as multibit multiply and accumulate (MAC) cells are presented and evaluated. As more involved circuits offer more accurate compute result, a tradeoff between design effort and accuracy comes into the picture. To further evaluate this tradeoff, the impact of variations on overall compute accuracy is discussed. The presented cells reach an energy/OP of 0.23 fJ at a size of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.2~{\mu{ }}\text{m}^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for binary and 6.04 fJ at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.2~\mu \text{m}^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4\times 4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> bit MAC operations.
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spelling doaj.art-7cc4c0186508466ea6ea37243f3d9cb92022-12-22T04:36:18ZengIEEEIEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits2329-92312022-01-018211912710.1109/JXCDC.2022.32170989930136Memristive Devices for Time Domain Compute-in-MemoryFlorian Freye0https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3025-8910Jie Lou1https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0380-8585Christopher Bengel2https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2892-9837Stephan Menzel3https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4258-2673Stefan Wiefels4https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2820-9677Tobias Gemmeke5https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1583-3411Chair of Integrated Digital Systems and Circuit Design, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, GermanyChair of Integrated Digital Systems and Circuit Design, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, GermanyInstitut f&#x00FC;r Werkstoffe der Elektrotechnik 2, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, GermanyForschungszentrum J&#x00FC;lich GmbH, Peter Gruenberg Institut (PGI-7), J&#x00FC;lich, GermanyForschungszentrum J&#x00FC;lich GmbH, Peter Gruenberg Institut (PGI-7), J&#x00FC;lich, GermanyChair of Integrated Digital Systems and Circuit Design, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, GermanyAnalog compute schemes and compute-in-memory (CIM) have emerged in an effort to reduce the increasing power hunger of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which exceeds the constraints of edge devices. Memristive device types are a relatively new offering with interesting opportunities for unexplored circuit concepts. In this work, the use of memristive devices in cascaded time-domain CIM (TDCIM) is introduced with the primary goal of reducing the size of fully unrolled architectures. The different effects influencing the determinism in memristive devices are outlined together with reliability concerns. Architectures for binary as well as multibit multiply and accumulate (MAC) cells are presented and evaluated. As more involved circuits offer more accurate compute result, a tradeoff between design effort and accuracy comes into the picture. To further evaluate this tradeoff, the impact of variations on overall compute accuracy is discussed. The presented cells reach an energy/OP of 0.23 fJ at a size of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.2~{\mu{ }}\text{m}^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for binary and 6.04 fJ at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.2~\mu \text{m}^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4\times 4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> bit MAC operations.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9930136/Compute-in-memory (CIM)convolutional neural networks (CNNs)memristive devicestime-domain (TD) computingtime-domain CIM (TDCIM)
spellingShingle Florian Freye
Jie Lou
Christopher Bengel
Stephan Menzel
Stefan Wiefels
Tobias Gemmeke
Memristive Devices for Time Domain Compute-in-Memory
IEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits
Compute-in-memory (CIM)
convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
memristive devices
time-domain (TD) computing
time-domain CIM (TDCIM)
title Memristive Devices for Time Domain Compute-in-Memory
title_full Memristive Devices for Time Domain Compute-in-Memory
title_fullStr Memristive Devices for Time Domain Compute-in-Memory
title_full_unstemmed Memristive Devices for Time Domain Compute-in-Memory
title_short Memristive Devices for Time Domain Compute-in-Memory
title_sort memristive devices for time domain compute in memory
topic Compute-in-memory (CIM)
convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
memristive devices
time-domain (TD) computing
time-domain CIM (TDCIM)
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9930136/
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AT jielou memristivedevicesfortimedomaincomputeinmemory
AT christopherbengel memristivedevicesfortimedomaincomputeinmemory
AT stephanmenzel memristivedevicesfortimedomaincomputeinmemory
AT stefanwiefels memristivedevicesfortimedomaincomputeinmemory
AT tobiasgemmeke memristivedevicesfortimedomaincomputeinmemory