Energy-Efficient Moderate Precision Time-Domain Mixed-signal Vector-by-Matrix Multiplier Exploiting 1T-1R Arrays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel time-domain mixed-signal vector-by-matrix multiplier using 1T-1R arrays, achieving high energy efficiency and moderate precision suitable for IoT and neuromorphic applications.

Contribution

It presents the first time-domain mixed-signal VMM leveraging 1T-1R arrays, overcoming energy inefficiencies of current approaches, and provides design guidelines for optimizing precision and efficiency.

Findings

Achieves approximately 6-bit computational precision.

Demonstrates a 200x200 VMM with ~1.5 POps/J energy efficiency.

Provides insights into non-ideal factors affecting precision.

Abstract

The emerging mobile devices in this era of internet-of-things (IoT) require a dedicated processor to enable computationally intensive applications such as neuromorphic computing and signal processing. Vector-by-matrix multiplication (VMM) is the most prominent operation in these applications. Therefore, there is a critical need for compact and ultralow-power VMM blocks to perform resource-intensive low-to-moderate precision computations. To this end, in this work, for the first time, we propose a time-domain mixed-signal VMM exploiting a modified configuration of 1MOSFET-1RRAM (1T-1R) array. The proposed VMM overcomes the energy inefficiency of the current-mode VMM approaches based on RRAMs. A rigorous analysis of the different non-ideal factors affecting the computational precision indicates that the non-negligible minimum cell currents, channel length modulation (CLM) and drain-induced barrier lowering (DIBL) are the dominant mechanisms degrading the precision of the proposed VMM. Our results also indicate that there exists a trade-off between the computational precision, dynamic range, and the area- and energy-efficiency of the proposed VMM approach. Therefore, we provide the necessary design guidelines for optimizing the performance. Our preliminary results show that an effective computational precision of 6-bits is achievable owing to an inherent compensation effect in the modified 1T-1R blocks. Furthermore, a 4-bit 200x200 VMM utilizing the proposed approach exhibits a significantly high energy efficiency of ~1.5 POps/J and a throughput of 2.5 TOps/s including the contribution from the input/output (I/O) circuitry.