CAP-RAM: A Charge-Domain In-Memory Computing 6T-SRAM for Accurate and Precision-Programmable CNN Inference
Abstract
A compact, accurate, and bitwidth-programmable in-memory computing (IMC) static random-access memory (SRAM) macro, named CAP-RAM, is presented for energy-efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) inference. It leverages a novel charge-domain multiply-and-accumulate (MAC) mechanism and circuitry to achieve superior linearity under process variations compared to conventional IMC designs. The adopted semi-parallel architecture efficiently stores filters from multiple CNN layers by sharing eight standard 6T SRAM cells with one charge-domain MAC circuit. Moreover, up to six levels of bit-width of weights with two encoding schemes and eight levels of input activations are supported. A 7-bit charge-injection SAR (ciSAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) getting rid of sample and hold (S&H); input/reference buffers further improves the overall energy efficiency and throughput. A 65-nm prototype validates the excellent linearity and computing accuracy of CAP-RAM. A single $512times 128$ macro stores a complete pruned and quantized CNN model to achieve 98.8% inference accuracy on the MNIST data set and 89.0% on the CIFAR-10 data set, with a 573.4-giga operations per second (GOPS) peak throughput and a 49.4-tera operations per second (TOPS)/W energy efficiency.
Zhiyu Chen
Ph.D. Student (started in 2018)
Zhanghao Yu
PhD 2023, now at Intel
Yan He
Ph.D. Student (started in 2018)
Jingyu Wang
Postdoctoral Scholar
Dai Li
PhD 2021, now at Google
