MC-CIM: a reconfigurable computation-in-memory for efficient stereo matching cost computation

Abstract

This paper proposes the design of a computation-in-memory for stereo matching cost computation. The matching cost computation incurs large energy and latency overhead because of frequent memory access. To overcome previous design limitations, this work, named MC-CIM, performs matching cost computation without incurring memory access and introduces several key features. (1) Lightweight balanced computing unit is integrated within cell array to reduce memory access and improve system throughput. (2) Self-optimized circuit design enables to alter arithmetic operation for matching algorithm in various scenario. (3) Flexible data mapping method and reconfigurable digital peripheral explore maximum parallelism on different algorithm and bit-precision. The proposed design is implemented in 28nm technology and achieves average performance of 277 TOPs/W.