Energy-efficient In-Memory Address Calculation

Abstract

Computation-in-Memory (CIM) is an emerging computing paradigm to address memory bottleneck challenges in computer architecture. A CIM unit cannot fully replace a general-purpose processor. Still, it significantly reduces the amount of data transfer between a traditional memory unit and the processor by enriching the transferred information. Data transactions between processor and memory consist of memory access addresses and values. While the main focus in the field of in-memory computing is to apply computations on the content of the memory (values), the importance of CPU-CIM address transactions and calculations for generating the sequence of access addresses for data-dominated applications is generally overlooked. However, the amount of information transactions used for "address" can easily be even more than half of the total transferred bits in many applications. In this article, we propose a circuit to perform the in-memory Address Calculation Accelerator. Our simulation results showed that calculating address sequences inside the memory (instead of the CPU) can significantly reduce the CPU-CIM address transactions and therefore contribute to considerable energy saving, latency, and bus traffic. For a chosen application of guided image filtering, in-memory address calculation results in almost two orders of magnitude reduction in address transactions over the memory bus.