Variability-aware Memristive Crossbars -- A Tutorial

TL;DR

This tutorial explains memristor crossbar architectures, focusing on variability sources such as device differences and nonlinearity, and discusses compensation techniques to improve practical application performance.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of variability issues in memristive crossbars and discusses strategies for mitigating their effects in real-world applications.

Findings

Identification of key variability sources in memristive crossbars

Overview of compensation techniques for variability reduction

Guidelines for designing robust memristive crossbar systems

Abstract

Memristor crossbar architecture is one of the most popular circuit configurations due to its wide range of practical applications. The crossbar architecture can emulate the weighted summation operation, called multiply and accumulate operation (MAC). The errors to MAC computing get introduced due to a range of crossbar variability. We broadly group the variability in three categories: (1) device-to-device variations, (2) programming nonlinearity, and (3) those from peripheral circuits. This tutorial provides insights into the variability and compensation approaches that can be adopted to reduce its impact when designing for practical applications with crossbars.