Energy-Efficient Non-Von Neumann Computing Architecture Supporting Multiple Computing Paradigms for Logic and Binarized Neural Networks

Different in-memory computing paradigms enabled by emerging non-volatile memory technologies are promising solutions for the development of ultra-low-power hardware for edge computing. Among these, SIMPLY, a smart logic-in-memory architecture, provides high reconfigurability and enables the in-memory computation of both logic operations and binarized neural networks (BNNs) inference. However, operation-specific hardware accelerators can result in better performance for a particular task, such as the analog computation of the multiply and accumulate operation for BNN inference, but lack reconfigurability. Nonetheless, a solution providing the flexibility of SIMPLY while also achieving the high performance of BNN-specific analog hardware accelerators is missing. In this work, we propose a novel in-memory architecture based on 1T1R crossbar arrays, which enables the coexistence on the same crossbar array of both SIMPLY computing paradigm and the analog acceleration of the multiply and accumulate operation for BNN inference. We also highlight the main design tradeoffs and opportunities enabled by different emerging non-volatile memory technologies. Finally, by using a physics-based Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) compact model calibrated on data from the literature, we show that the proposed architecture improves the energy delay product by >103 times when performing a BNN inference task with respect to a SIMPLY implementation.