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Qiuling Zhu, K. Vaidyanathan, O. Shacham, M. Horowitz, Lawrence Pileggi and Franz Franchetti (Proc. IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP), pp. 125-132, 2012)
Design Automation Framwork for Application-Specific Logic-in-Memory Blocks
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Published paper (link to publisher)
Bibtex

This paper presents a design methodology for hardware synthesis of application-specific logic-in-memory (LiM) blocks. Logic-in-memory designs tightly integrate specialized computation logic with embedded memory, enabling more localized computation, thus save energy consumption. As a demonstration, we present an end-to-end design framework to automatically synthesize an interpolation based logic-in-memory block named interpolation memory, which combines a seed table with simple arithmetic logic to efficiently evaluate functions. In order to support multiple consecutive seed data access that is required in the interpolation operation, we synthesize the physical memory into the novel rectangular access smart memory blocks. We evaluated a large design space of interpolation memories in sub-20 nm commercial CMOS technology by using the proposed design framework. Furthermore, we implemented a logic-in-memory based computed tomography (CT) medical image reconstruction system and our experimental results show that the logic-in-memory computing method achieves orders of magnitude of energy saving compared with the traditional in-processor computing.

Keywords:
Memory, Automatic generation, Design, Logic-in-memory