Software Platform Dedicated for In-Memory Computing Circuit Evaluation

This paper presents a new software platform, co-developed by research teams with expertises in memory design, and software engineering and compilation aspects, to dimension and evaluate a novel In-Memory Power Aware CompuTing (IMPACT) system for IoT. IMPACT circuit is an emerging memory that promises to save execution time and power consumption by embedding computing abilities. The proposed platform permits to manually convert a software application from conventional to IMPACT implementation using vector representation. The two implementations are then compiled on the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) and traced in order to evaluate their performance in terms of timing and energy consumption. The results of emulating image-processing and secure applications on IMPACT system show a significant gain in the execution time and the energy consumption compared to a conventional system with an ARM Cortex®-M7 processor. The execution time can be reduced from 50x to 6145x, depending on the application and the workload size. Furthermore, the gain of the energy consumption is about 12.6x.