E-ReCON: An Energy- and Resource-Efficient Precision-Configurable Sparse nvCIM Macro for Conventional and Spiking Neural Edge Inference

TL;DR

E-ReCON is a compact, energy-efficient digital compute-in-memory macro utilizing ReRAM technology, optimized for edge-AI inference with high throughput and accuracy across CNN and SNN workloads.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel 3T1R ReRAM bitcell and interleaved adder tree, significantly reducing power, latency, and resource overhead for edge-AI inference.

Findings

Achieves up to 419 TOPS/W energy efficiency.

Supports high accuracy on multiple datasets with pruning.

Reduces latency and energy by 30-40% compared to prior designs.

Abstract

This work presents E-ReCON, a 16 Kb energy and resource-efficient digital compute-in-memory (DCIM) macro based on a compact 3T1R ReRAM bitcell for edge-AI inference. The proposed bitcell occupies only 0.85 um^2 and supports reliable AND-based in-memory multiplication for both conventional convolutional neural network (CNN) and spiking neural network (SNN) workloads. To reduce accumulation overhead, a novel interleaved 10T/28T adder tree is introduced, reducing transistor count and power consumption by 37% and 28%, respectively, compared to a conventional 28T RCA-based design. Implemented in 65 nm CMOS at 1.2 V, the proposed macro achieves a minimum latency of 0.48 ns, throughput of 2.31-3.1 TOPS, and energy efficiency of up to 419 TOPS/W. When evaluated on LeNet-5, AlexNet, and CNN-8 models, the macro achieves 97.81%, 93.23%, and 96.51% accuracy on MNIST/A-Z, CIFAR10, and SVHN datasets, respectively. In addition, 40% pruning preserves nearly 99.8% of the original accuracy while reducing MAC operations and computation cycles. For SNN-oriented workloads, the proposed AND-type bitcell efficiently supports spike-weight multiplication with low switching activity, where the 2A2W configuration achieves accuracy close to the FP32 baseline across VGG-8, VGG-16, and ResNet-18 networks on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K datasets. Compared to prior ADC-based ReRAM-CIM designs, the proposed architecture improves latency and energy efficiency by nearly 30-40% while maintaining robust operation under full PVT and ReRAM variability. Overall, E-ReCON provides a scalable, low-latency, and energy-efficient nvCIM platform for next-generation edge-AI, IoT, biomedical sensing, and neuromorphic applications.