(A) mixed-mode computing-in-memory processor for energy-efficient mixed-precision deep neural networks

Abstract

A Mixed-mode Computing-in memory (CIM) processor for the mixed-precision Deep Neural Network (DNN) processing is proposed. Due to the bit-serial processing for the multi-bit data, the previous CIM processors could not exploit the energy-efficient computation of mixed-precision DNNs. This paper proposes an energy-efficient mixed-mode CIM processor with two key features: 1) Mixed-Mode Mixed-precision CIM (M3-CIM) which achieves 55.46% energy efficiency improvement. 2) Digital-CIM for In-memory MAC for the increased throughput of M3-CIM. The proposed CIM processor was simulated in 28nm CMOS technology and occupies 1.96 mm2. It achieves a state-of-the-art energy efficiency of 161.6 TOPS/W with 72.8% accuracy at ImageNet (ResNet50).