4b/4b/8b Precision Charge-Domain 8T-SRAM Based CiM for CNN Processing

Compute-in-memory (CiM) is a promising solution for solving the bottleneck of frequent data movement between the memory and processor in Von-Neumann architecture. In conventional multi-bit CiM architecture, when computing N-bit input and N-bit weight MAC operation, 2N 1 cycles are needed for N-bit input modulation and normally 3-4−cycles with complex switch operation are needed for N-bit weight realization, which significantly degrades the final throughput and power efficiency. In this work, a C-2C DAC built in the 8T SRAM CiM array is designed for 4-bit weight and 4-bit input MAC operation, which can be completed in just one cycle. In the final power efficiency evaluation, our 4b/4b/8b CiM architecture attained up to 640 TOPS/W (normalized to 1b/1b/1b precision) which is a 6-10 times improvement as compared to the conventional multi-bit CiM architectures. The proposed architecture with 4b/4b/8b precision can provide 91.47% and 68.10% accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 dataset classification, respectively.