SPCIM: Sparsity-Balanced Practical CIM Accelerator With Optimized Spatial-Temporal Multi-Macro Utilization

Compute-in-memory (CIM) is a promising technique that reduces data movement in neural network (NN) acceleration. To achieve higher efficiency, some recent CIM accelerators exploit NN sparsity based on CIM’s small-grained operation unit (OU) feature. However, new problems arise in a practical multi-macro accelerator: The mismatch between workload parallelism and CIM macro organization causes spatial under-utilization; The multiple macros’ different computation time leads to temporal under-utilization. To solve the under-utilization problems, we propose a Sparsity-balanced Practical CIM accelerator (SPCIM), including optimized dataflow and hardware architecture design. For the CIM dataflow design, we first propose a reconfigurable cluster topology for CIM macro organization. Then we regularize weight sparsity in the OU-height pattern and reorder the weight matrix based on the sparsity ratio. The cluster topology can be reshaped to match workload parallelism for higher spatial utilization. Each CIM cluster’s workload is dynamically rebalanced for higher temporal utilization. Our hardware architecture supports the proposed dataflow with a spatial input dispatcher and a temporal workload allocator. Experimental results show that, compared with the baseline sparse CIM accelerator that suffers from spatial and temporal under-utilization, SPCIM achieves $2.94\times $ speedup and $2.86\times $ energy saving. The proposed sparsity-balanced dataflow and architecture are generic and scalable, which can be applied to other CIM accelerators. We strengthen two state-of-the-art CIM accelerators with the SPCIM techniques, improving their energy efficiency by $1.92\times $ and $5.59\times $ , respectively.