Owing to mature fabrication support and high flexibility, static random-access memory (SRAM) has become a very promising candidate for compute-in-memory (CiM) in accelerating deep neural networks (DNNs). However, SRAM-based CiM has low memory density and thus very limited total on-chip capacity, resulting in frequent weights reloading and additional power consumption during end-to-end inference tasks. Analog ROM CiM increases memory density but suffers from low computing density caused by A/D converter (ADC) limitation. To address these challenges, for the first time, a fully digital compute-in-read-only-memory (DCiROM) design approach is proposed in this paper. DCiROM introduces a novel ROM-logic fusion CiM that successfully reduces CiM area by 51% while maintaining high memory density and computing performance. By reusing multiply-and-accumulation (MAC) resources, DCiROM further achieves flexibility with a minimal area cost. We have implemented a DCiROM chip loaded 3024Kb ResNet-56 parameters using 65nm CMOS technology. This macro achieves 10.2x-55.7x higher normalized FoM (memory density x computing density) than the state-of-the-art CiM works. It also reduces 2.9x-9.9x energy consumption per image inference than SRAM CiM works when considering off-chip access.

Deploying a lightweight quantized model in compute-in-memory (CIM) might result in significant accuracy degradation due to reduced signal-noise rate (SNR). To address this issue, this paper presents ZEBRA, a zero-bit robust-accumulation CIM approach, which utilizes bitwise zero patterns to compress computation with ultra-high resilience against noise due to circuit non-idealities, etc. First, ZEBRA provides a cross-level design that successfully exploits value-adaptive zero-bit patterns to improve the performance in robust 8-bit quantization dramatically. Second, ZEBRA presents a multi-level local computing unit circuit design to implement the bitwise sparsity pattern, which boosts the area/energy efficiency by 2x-4x compared with existing CIM works. Experiments demonstrate that ZEBRA can achieve10% accuracy loss. Such robustness leads to much more stable accuracy for high-parallelism inference on large models in practice.

Multi-level cell (MLC) NVM-based CiM has become a promising candidate in computing-in-memory (CiM) designs because of its non-volatility, high cell density, and improving compatibility with the CMOS process. However, most MLC CiM faces the challenges of non-ideal device limitations, including the low on/off ratio, large device-to-device variations, and read disturbances, which limit the computing accuracy, reliability, and throughput performance. This work proposes Victor, a variation-resilient approach using cell-clustered charge-domain computing for high-density and high-throughput MLC CiM. A cell-clustered-computing with local recovery unit (LRU) design methodology is proposed to improve matrix-vector-multiplication (MVM) reliability and throughput. To showcase the capability of Victor, 2b-4b MLC Resistive RAM (RRAM) is taken as an example for design and evaluation. Results show that Victor reaches 3.56x energy efficiency, 4x variation tolerance compared with the prior ratio-based MLC CiM. In addition, the throughput is improved by 3.1x with less than 1% DNN accuracy loss. Moreover, a dynamic boundary adaption approach is proposed to restore the accuracy loss of state drifting, which in return reduces the energy and latency overhead by 100x and 1.25x, respectively, compared with the conventional write-and-verify approach.

Performing data-intensive tasks in the von Neumann architecture is challenging to achieve both high performance and energy efficiency due to the memory wall bottleneck. Compute-in-memory (CiM) is a promising mitigation approach by enabling parallel and in-situ multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations within the memory array. Thanks to the good matching of capacitors, SRAM-based charge-domain CiM (Q-CiM) has shown its potential for higher row-wise parallelism. However, the peripheral circuits of Q-CiM, such as the input drivers and analog-digital converters (ADCs), limit further improvement of throughput and area efficiency. This paper proposes a single-ADC multi-bit accumulation CiM macro architecture SAMBA, which can perform multi-bit MAC operation with ReLU of two vectors in one CiM cycle by only a single A/D conversion to mitigate the ADC overhead. In addition, post-correction methods are proposed to compensate the non-linearity of sensitive circuit modules in SAMBA to recover the accuracy drop due to the capacitor mismatch. A proof-of-concept macro is fabricated in a 65nm process and achieves 51.2GOPS throughput and 10.3TOPS/W energy efficiency, while showing 88.6% accuracy on CIFAR-10 and 64.8% accuracy on the CIFAR-100 with VGG-8 model.

Bitwise logic-in-memory (BLiM) is a promising approach to efficient computing in data-intensive applications by reducing data movement between memory and processing units. However, existing BLiM techniques have challenges towards higher energy efficiency and speed: (i) DC power in computing and result sensing is significant in most existing RRAM and MRAM based BLiM solutions; (ii) before the computation result could be stored back to the same memory array, existing BLiM has to sense the result first, at the cost of extra power and latency due to the sense amplifiers (SAs). Targeting at higher energy efficiency and speed, this work proposes a new BLiM approach in 2-transistor/ cell (2T/C) and 3T/C topologies based on ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs), supporting a variety of computing functions. For the first time, this new approach supports SA-free direct write-back, and consumes no static power for computing and sensing with proposed fully dynamic computing and sensing schemes. Another highlight is that this work further minimizes the dynamic power by (i) reducing the chance of bitline charging activities and (ii) recycling the bitline charge in sensing multi-operand operations. Compared with prior BLiM methods based on nonvolatile memories, evaluation shows 3.0x–100x latency and 1.3x–200x energy improvement for typical in- memory XOR operation, which further leads to 3.0x–58x and 3.2x–78x savings of latency and energy, respectively, for the application of advanced-encryption standard (AES).

Computing-in-memory (CiM) is a promising technique to achieve high energy efficiency in data-intensive matrix-vector multiplication (MVM) by relieving the memory bottleneck. Unfortunately, due to the limited SRAM capacity, existing SRAM-based CiM needs to reload the weights from DRAM in large-scale networks. This undesired fact weakens the energy efficiency significantly. This work, for the first time, proposes the concept, design, and optimization of computing-in-ROM to achieve much higher on-chip memory capacity, and thus less DRAM access and lower energy consumption. Furthermore, to support different computing scenarios with varying weights, a weight fine-tune technique, namely Residual Branch (ReBranch), is also proposed. ReBranch combines ROM-CiM and assisting SRAM-CiM to achieve high versatility. YOLoC, a ReBranch-assisted ROM-CiM framework for object detection is presented and evaluated. With the same area in 28nm CMOS, YOLoC for several datasets has shown significant energy efficiency improvement by 14.8x for YOLO (DarkNet-19) and 4.8x for ResNet-18, with <8% latency overhead and almost no mean average precision (mAP) loss (−0.5% ~ +0.2%), compared with the fully SRAM-based CiM.

Motivated by reducing the data transfer activities in data-intensive neural network computing, SRAM-based compute-in-memory (CiM) has made significant progress. Unfortunately, SRAM has low density and limited on-chip capacity. This makes the deployment of large models inefficient due to the frequent DRAM access to update the weight in SRAM. Recently, a ROM-based CiM design, YOLoC, reveals the unique opportunity of deploying a large-scale neural network in CMOS by exploring the intriguing high density of ROM. However, even though assisting SRAM has been adopted in YOLoC for task transfer within the same domain, it is still a big challenge to overcome the read-only limitation in ROM and enable more flexibility. Therefore, it is of paramount significance to develop new ROM-based CiM architectures and provide broader task space and model expansion capability for more complex tasks.

Compute-in-memory (CiM) is a promising method for mitigating the memory wall problem in data-intensive applications. The proposed bitwise logic-in-memory (BLiM) is targeted at data intensive applications, such as database, data encryption. This work proposes a low-power BLiM approach using the emerging nonvolatile ferroelectric FETs with direct write-back and data-adaptive dynamic sensing interface. Apart from general-purpose random-access memory, it also supports BLiM operations such as copy, not, nand, xor, and full adder (FA). The novel features of the proposed architecture include: (i) direct result-write-back based on the remnant bitline BLiM charge that avoids bitline sensing and charging operations; (ii) a fully dynamic sensing interface that needs no static reference current, but adopts data-adaptive voltage references for certain multi-operand operations, and (iii) selective bitline charging from wordline (instead of pre-charging all bitlines) to save power and also enable direct write-back. Detailed BLiM operations and benchmarking against conventional approaches show the promise of low-power computing with the FeFET-based circuit techniques.