Low-Cost 7T-SRAM Compute-In-Memory Design based on Bit-Line Charge-Sharing based Analog-To-Digital Conversion

Abstract

Although compute-in-memory (CIM) is considered as one of the promising solutions to overcome memory wall problem, the variations in analog voltage computation and analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) cost still remain as design challenges. In this paper, we present a 7T SRAM CIM that seamlessly supports multiply-accumulation (MAC) operation between 4-bit inputs and 8-bit weights. In the proposed CIM, highly parallel and robust MAC operations are enabled by exploiting the bit-line charge-sharing scheme to simultaneously process multiple inputs. For the readout of analog MAC values, instead of adopting the conventional ADC structure, the bit-line charge-sharing is efficiently used to reduce the implementation cost of the reference voltage generations. Based on the in-SRAM reference voltage generation and the parallel analog readout in all columns, the proposed CIM efficiently reduces ADC power and area cost. In addition, the variation models from Monte-Carlo simulations are also used during training to reduce the accuracy drop due to process variations. The implementation of 256×64 7T SRAM CIM using 28nm CMOS process shows that it operates in the wide voltage range from 0.6V to 1.2V with energy efficiency of 45.8-TOPS/W at 0.6V.