CIM-based Robust Logic Accelerator using 28 nm STT-MRAM Characterization Chip Tape-out

Abstract

Spin-transfer torque magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM) based computation-in-memory (CIM) architectures have shown great prospects for an energy-efficient computing. However, device variations and non-idealities narrow down the sensing margin that severely impacts the computing accuracy. In this work, we propose an adaptive referencing mechanism to improve the sensing margin of a CIM architecture for boolean binary logic (BBL) operations. We generate reference signals using multiple STT-MRAM devices and place them strategically into the array such that these signals can address the variations and trace the wire parasitics effectively. We have demonstrated this behavior using an STT-MRAM model, which is calibrated using 1Mbit characterized array. Results show that our proposed architecture for binary neural networks (BNN) achieves up to 17.8 TOPS/W on the MNIST dataset and 130x performance improvement for the text encryption compared to the software implementation on Intel Haswell processor.