(An) in-memory parallel computing processor for energy-efficient and high accuracy deep neural network computation

Abstract

Recent computing-in-memory (CIM) achieves high energy efficiency with charge-domain computation and multi-bit input driving. However, the previous works still require high power consumption and trade computation signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for energy efficiency. This work proposes an energy-efficient and accurate multi-bit input/weight-parallel CIM processor with four key features: 1) a 10T2C sign-magnitude cell with voltage-capacitance-ratio (VCR) decoding for 5-bit analog inputs with only 2-level supply voltages, 2) a computation word line (CWL) charge reuse method for input driver power reduction, 3) a signal-amplifying noise canceling voltage-to-time converter (SANC-VTC) for SNR improvement, and 4) a distribution-aware time-to-digital converter (DA-TDC) for ADC power reduction. The proposed CIM processor is simulated in 28 nm CMOS technology with 1.25 mm$^2$ area. As a result, it achieves 4.44 mW power consumption and 332 TOPS/W energy efficiency with 72.43% benchmark accuracy (@ ImageNet, ResNet50, 5-bit input/5-bit weight).