FeMIC: Multi-Operands in-Memory Computing Based on FeFETs

Abstract

The “memory wall” bottleneck caused by the performance gap between processors and memories is getting worse. Computing-in-memory (CiM), a promising technology to alleviate the “memory wall” bottleneck, has recently attracted much attention. Conventional CiM architectures based on emerging nonvolatile devices have a major drawback that they need ${N\,-\,1}$ clock cycles to complete a CiM operation with ${N}$ operands, as they are natively designed for processing two operands. In this work, we propose FeMIC, a new CiM architecture based on ferroelectric field-effect transistors (FeFETs), which natively supports the computation of multiple operands. For a CiM operation with ${N}$ operands, FeMIC only needs $\left\lfloor {N/2} \right\rfloor$ clock cycles. The simulation results based on a calibrated FeFET model reveal that FeMIC can significantly reduce the energy consumption when processing multi-operand CiM operations, compared with state-of-the-arts that use conventional CiM mechanisms.