On the Limitations of Concatenating Boolean Operations in Memristive-Based Logic-In-Memory Solutions

Abstract

Emerging non-volatile memories are widely studied today as means to maximize energy efficiency and because they enable the so-called Computation-In-Memory. The Logic-inMemory (LIM) paradigm is a subset of the Computation-inMemory and it focuses on the execution of Boolean operations inside the memory. Among the most popular solutions, MAGIC and FELIX promise non-input destructive operations, as classical computation paradigms, allowing therefore to re-use the set of input data for several operations. In this paper we have analyzed the electrical behavior of some significant LIM implementations (MAGIC NOR and FELIX NAND) under various operation conditions. Our results show that it is not trivial to guarantee noninput destructive operations (in the case of FELIX NAND) and there is a real difficulty in concatenating several operations due to non-ideal intermediate results.