34.4 A 3nm, 32.5TOPS/W, 55.0TOPS/mm<sup>2</sup> and 3.78Mb/mm<sup>2</sup> Fully-Digital Compute-in-Memory Macro Supporting INT12 × INT12 with a Parallel-MAC Architecture and Foundry 6T-SRAM Bit Cell
Hidehiro Fujiwara, H. Mori, Wei-Chang Zhao, Kinshuk Khare, Cheng-En Lee, Xiaochen Peng, Vineet Joshi, Chao-Kai Chuang, Shu-Huan Hsu, Takeshi Hashizume, Toshiaki Naganuma, Chen-Hung Tien, Yao-Yi Liu, Yen-Chien Lai, Chia-Fu Lee, Tan‐Li Chou, Kerem Akarvardar, Saman Adham, Yih Wang, Yu-Der Chih, Yen-Huei Chen, Hung-Jen Liao, Tsung-Yung Jonathan Chang
Abstract
Compute-in-memory (CIM) is being widely explored to minimize power consumption related to data movement and multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) operations for AI edge devices. Compared to analog based CIMs, digital-based CIMs (DCIM), which include small, distributed SRAM banks and a customized MAC unit, realize massively parallel computation with no accuracy loss and better power-performance-area (PPA) scaling with advanced technologies. However, balancing operating efficiency per area (TOPS/mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) and bit density (Mb/mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) is one of the challenges in prior DCIMs because of low operating throughput caused by bit-serial input and a small number of rows. In this paper, we introduce a 3nm SRAM-based DCIM macro, which is based on foundry 6T SRAM bit cells and a parallel-MAC scheme to improve bit cell density and operating throughput. The DCIM macro is implemented with CIM BIST in a test chip, and confirms ultra-low voltage MAC operation down to 360mV, and 1.5GHz operation at 0.9V. The DCIM achieves 32.5TOPS/W (assuming a 25% input toggle rate and a 50% weight = 1 distribution), 55.0TOPS/mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and 3.78 Mb/mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .