A Computation-In-Memory Accelerator Based on Resistive Devices

Abstract

Today's computing architectures suffer from the three well-known bottlenecks, which are the memory, the power and the instruction-level parallelism walls. Emerging non-volatile technologies, such as memristor, enable new resistive architectures that alleviate at least two of such bottlenecks, as they can process data within the memory with almost no leakage. In this paper, we propose a novel resistive computing architecture by extending a conventional architecture with a resistive based Computation-In-Memory accelerator (CIMX). We evaluate the delay, energy and area of the conventional and CIMX architecture using an analytical model and a simulation framework. The results (both based on the analytical model and simulation framework) show that the proposed architecture achieves at least one order of magnitude improvement in terms of performance, area, and energy efficiency for the considered benchmarks.