Energy Efficient Dual Designs of FeFET-Based Analog In-Memory Computing with Inherent Shift-Add Capability

TL;DR

This paper introduces energy-efficient FeFET-based analog in-memory computing designs with inherent shift-add capabilities, enhancing multiply-accumulate operations for deep neural networks.

Contribution

It proposes novel dual FeFET-based IMC architectures that integrate shift-add functionality within the memory array, improving energy efficiency and supporting high-precision weights.

Findings

Energy efficiency improved by 1.56x/1.37x over state-of-the-art designs.

Supports both 2's complement and non-2's complement MAC operations.

Enables high-precision analog IMC with integrated shift-add capability.

Abstract

In-memory computing (IMC) architecture emerges as a promising paradigm, improving the energy efficiency of multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) operations within DNNs by integrating the parallel computations within the memory arrays. Various high-precision analog IMC array designs have been developed based on both SRAM and emerging non-volatile memories. These designs perform MAC operations of partial input and weight, with the corresponding partial products then fed into shift-add circuitry to produce the final MAC results. However, existing works often present intricate shift-add process for weight. The traditional digital shift-add process is limited in throughput due to time-multiplexing of ADCs, and advancing the shift-add process to the analog domain necessitates customized circuit implementations, resulting in compromises in energy and area efficiency. Furthermore, the joint optimization of the partial MAC operations and the weight shift-add process is rarely explored. In this paper, we propose novel, energy efficient dual designs of FeFET based high precision analog IMC featuring inherent shift-add capability. We introduce a FeFET based IMC paradigm that performs partial MAC in each column, and inherently integrates the shift-add process for 4-bit weights by leveraging FeFET's analog storage characteristics. This paradigm supports both 2's complement mode and non-2's complement mode MAC, thereby offering flexible support for 4-/8-bit weight data in 2's complement format. Building upon this paradigm, we propose novel FeFET based dual designs, CurFe for the current mode and ChgFe for the charge mode, to accommodate the high precision analog domain IMC architecture.Evaluation results at circuit and system levels indicate that the circuit/system-level energy efficiency of the proposed FeFET-based analog IMC is 1.56$\times$/1.37$\times$ higher when compared to SOTA analog IMC designs.