Paper ID: 2407.08990

Dynamic neural network with memristive CIM and CAM for 2D and 3D vision

Yue Zhang, Woyu Zhang, Shaocong Wang, Ning Lin, Yifei Yu, Yangu He, Bo Wang, Hao Jiang, Peng Lin, Xiaoxin Xu, Xiaojuan Qi, Zhongrui Wang, Xumeng Zhang, Dashan Shang, Qi Liu, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Ming Liu

The brain is dynamic, associative and efficient. It reconfigures by associating the inputs with past experiences, with fused memory and processing. In contrast, AI models are static, unable to associate inputs with past experiences, and run on digital computers with physically separated memory and processing. We propose a hardware-software co-design, a semantic memory-based dynamic neural network (DNN) using memristor. The network associates incoming data with the past experience stored as semantic vectors. The network and the semantic memory are physically implemented on noise-robust ternary memristor-based Computing-In-Memory (CIM) and Content-Addressable Memory (CAM) circuits, respectively. We validate our co-designs, using a 40nm memristor macro, on ResNet and PointNet++ for classifying images and 3D points from the MNIST and ModelNet datasets, which not only achieves accuracy on par with software but also a 48.1% and 15.9% reduction in computational budget. Moreover, it delivers a 77.6% and 93.3% reduction in energy consumption.

Submitted: Jul 12, 2024