AFPR-CIM: An Analog-Domain Floating-Point RRAM-based Compute-In-Memory Architecture with Dynamic Range Adaptive FP-ADC

Abstract

Power consumption has become the major concern in neural network accelerators for edge devices. The novel non-volatile-memory (NVM) based computing-in-memory (CIM) architecture has shown great potential for better energy efficiency. However, most of the recent NVM-CIM solutions mainly focus on fixed-point calculation and are not applicable to floating-point (FP) processing. In this paper, we propose an analog-domain floating-point CIM architecture (AFPR-CIM) based on resistive random-access memory (RRAM). A novel adaptive dynamic-range FP-ADC is designed to convert the analog computation results into FP codes. Output current with high dynamic range is converted to a normalized voltage range for readout, to prevent precision loss at low power consumption. Moreover, a novel FP-DAC is also implemented which reconstructs FP digital codes into analog values to perform analog computation. The proposed AFPR-CIM architecture enables neural network acceleration with FP8 (E2M5) activation for better accuracy and energy efficiency. Evaluation results show that AFPR-CIM can achieve 19.89 TFLOPS/W energy efficiency and 1474.56 GOPS throughput. Compared to traditional FP8 accelerator, digital FP-CIM, and analog INT8-CIM, this work achieves 4.135x, 5.376x, and 2.841x energy efficiency enhancement, respectively.