Deep Neural Network Acceleration in Non-Volatile Memory: A Digital Approach

Latest algorithmic development has brought competitive classification accuracy for neural networks despite constraining the network parameters to ternary or binary representations. These findings show significant optimization opportunities to replace computationally-intensive convolution operations (based on multiplication) with more efficient and less complex operations such as addition. In hardware implementation domain, processing-in-memory architecture is becoming a promising solution to alleviate enormous energy-hungry data communication between memory and processing units, bringing considerable improvement for system performance and energy efficiency while running such large networks. In this paper, we review several of our recent works regarding Processing-in-Memory (PIM) accelerator based on Magnetic Random Access Memory computational sub-arrays to accelerate the inference mode of quantized neural networks using digital non-volatile memory rather than using analog crossbar operation. In this way, we investigate the performance of two distinct in-memory addition schemes compared to other digital methods based on processing-in-DRAM/GPU/ASIC design to tackle DNN power and memory wall bottleneck.