Functionality Enhanced Memories for Edge-AI Embedded Systems

Abstract

With the surge in complexity of edge workloads, it appeared in the scientific community that such workloads cannot be anymore overflown to the cloud due to the huge edge device to server communication energy cost and the high energy consumption induced in high end server infrastructure. In this context, edge devices must be able to efficiently process complex data-intensive workloads bringing in the concept of Edge AI. However, current architectures show poor energy efficiency while running data intensive workloads. While the community looks toward the integration of new memory architectures using emerging resistive memories and new specific accelerators, we propose a new concept to boost the energy efficiency of Edge systems running data intensive workloads: Functionality Enhanced Memories (FEM). FEM consist on a memory architecture with new functionalities at a decent area overhead cost. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of native transpose access for 1Transistor-1RRAM bitcells leveraging three independent gates transistors. Based on that, we thereby propose a concept of FEM-enabled Edge system embedding the proposed native transpose access RRAM-based memory architecture and an in-SRAM computing architecture (the BLADE).