Enabling New Computing Paradigms with Emerging Symmetric-Access Memories

This paper first presents a review of the circuit topologies of recently emerged symmetric memories that support 2-dimensional row-wise and column-wise accesses of read and write operations. Supporting technologies include CMOS, ferroelectric FET (FeFET) and two-terminal resistive memory devices. This paper will reveal how the emerging memory feature of access flexibility could enable new computing paradigms by providing fundamental savings of memory access times with column-wise memory access support. This benefit exists in both conventional applications and emerging computing, such as in-memory database and neural networks. In addition, this paper also proposes 2T1R, a new symmetric memory circuit design based on two-terminal resistive devices, such as RRAM and MTJ. This new design exhibits improved leakage power and scaling capability, as compared with the existing RRAM-based crossbar symmetric memory design.