학술논문

RDCIM: RISC-V Supported Full-Digital Computing-in-Memory Processor With High Energy Efficiency and Low Area Overhead
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. I Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, IEEE Transactions on. 71(4):1719-1732 Apr, 2024
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Adders
Arrays
SRAM cells
Registers
Energy efficiency
Computational efficiency
Mirrors
Computing-in-memory
RISC-V
extended instructions
re-configurable precision
Language
ISSN
1549-8328
1558-0806
Abstract
Digital computing-in-memory (DCIM) that merges computing logic into memory has been proven to be an efficient architecture for accelerating multiply-and-accumulates (MACs). However, low energy efficiency and high area overhead pose a primary restriction for integrating DCIM in re-configurable processors required for multi-functional workloads. To alleviate this dilemma, a novel RISC-V supported full-digital computing-in-memory processor (RDCIM) is designed and fabricated with 55nm CMOS technology. In RDCIM, an adding-on-memory-boundary (AOMB) scheme is adopted to improve the energy efficiency of DCIM. Meanwhile, a multi-precision adaptive accumulator (MPAA) and a serial-parallel conversion supported SRAM buffer (SPBUF) are employed to reduce the area overhead caused by the peripheral circuits and the intermediate buffer for multi-precision support. The results show that the energy efficiency in our design is 16.6 TOPS/W (8-bit) and 66.3 TOPS/W (4-bit). Compared to related works, the proposed RDCIM macro shows a maximum energy efficiency improvement of $1.22\times $ in a continuous computing scenario, an area saving of $1.22\times $ in the accumulator, and an area saving of $3.12\times $ in the input buffer. Moreover, in RDCIM, 5 fine-grained RISC-V extended instructions are designed to dynamically adjust the state of DCIM, reaching $1.2\times $ computation efficiency.