TEFLON: Thermally Efficient Dataflow-Aware 3D NoC for Accelerating CNN Inferencing on Manycore PIM Architectures

Resistive random-access memory (ReRAM) based processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures are used extensively to accelerate inferencing/training with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Three-dimensional (3D) integration is an enabling technology to integrate many PIM cores on a single chip. In this work, we propose the design of a thermally efficient dataflow-aware monolithic 3D (M3D) NoC architecture referred to as \(TEFLON\) to accelerate CNN inferencing without creating any thermal bottlenecks. \(TEFLON\) reduces the Energy-Delay-Product (EDP) by 4 \(2\%\), \(46\%\), and 45 \(\%\) on an average compared to a conventional 3D mesh NoC for systems with 36-, 64-, and 100-PIM cores respectively. \(TEFLON\) reduces the peak chip temperature by 25 \(K\) and improves the inference accuracy by up to 11 \(\%\) compared to sole performance-optimized SFC-based counterpart for inferencing with diverse deep CNN models using CIFAR-10/100 datasets on a 3D system with 100-PIM cores.