Embedding error correction into crossbars for reliable matrix vector multiplication using emerging devices

Emerging memory devices are an attractive choice for implementing very energy-efficient in-situ matrix-vector multiplication (MVM) for use in intelligent edge platforms. Despite their great potential, device-level non-idealities have a large impact on the application-level accuracy of deep neural network (DNN) inference. We introduce a low-density parity-check code (LDPC) based approach to correct non-ideality induced errors encountered during in-situ MVM. We first encode the weights using error correcting codes (ECC), perform MVM on the encoded weights, and then decode the result after in-situ MVM. We show that partial encoding of weights can maintain DNN inference accuracy while minimizing the overhead of LDPC decoding. Within two iterations, our ECC method recovers 60% of the accuracy in MVM computations when 5% of underlying computations are error-prone. Compared to an alternative ECC method which uses arithmetic codes, using LDPC improves AlexNet classification accuracy by 0.8% at iso-energy. Similarly, at iso-energy, we demonstrate an improvement in CIFAR-10 classification accuracy of 54% with VGG-11 when compared to a strategy that uses 2× redundancy in weights. Further design space explorations demonstrate that we can leverage the resilience endowed by ECC to improve energy efficiency (by reducing operating voltage). A 3.3× energy efficiency improvement in DNN inference on CIFAR-10 dataset with VGG-11 is achieved at iso-accuracy.