ReverSearch: Search-based energy-efficient Processing-in-Memory Architecture

Recent development of the processing-in-memory (PIM) architecture has demonstrated high efficiency by reducing data movements. However, the performance of the conventional PIM architecture is limited by several issues, including frequent bit-line operations, complicated control of data flow, and massive inter-macro data movements. In addition, both analog- and digital-PIM solutions have obstacles to meet requirement of high-precision computation. In this work, we explore the tradeoff between data movement and energy efficiency of PIM architecture. We develop a PIM architecture, namely ReverSearch, to accelerate multiple-and-accumulate operation, equipped with reverse searching engine and look up table operations. Also, the corresponding data mapping and data flow methods are provided to improve the performance of the ReverSearch architecture. Based on our evaluation, ReverSearch improves the energy efficiency by 17.26 × and 3.68 ×, compared to the baseline of LUT-Cache [1] and LAcc [2].