CiM3D: Comparator-in-Memory Designs Using Monolithic 3-D Technology for Accelerating Data-Intensive Applications
Akshay Krishna Ramanathan, Srivatsa Srinivasa Rangachar, Hariram Thirucherai Govindarajan, Je-Min Hung, Chun‐Ying Lee, Cheng-Xin Xue, Sheng-Po Huang, Fu-Kuo Hsueh, Chang‐Hong Shen, Jia‐Min Shieh, Wen‐Kuan Yeh, Mon‐Shu Ho, Jack Sampson, Meng‐Fan Chang, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan · IEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits · 2021
The compare operation is widely used in many applications, from fundamental sorting to primitive operations in the database and AI systems. We present SRAM-based 3-D-CAM circuit designs using a monolithic 3-D (M3D) integration process for realizing beyond-Boolean in-memory compare operation without any area overheads. We also fabricated a processing-in-memory (PiM) macro with the same 3-D-CAM circuit using M3D for performing massively parallel compare operations used in the database, machine learning, and scientific applications. We show various system designs with the 3-D-CAM supporting operations, such as data filtering, sorting, and sparse matrix–matrix multiplication (SpGEMM). Our systems exhibit up to$272\times $,$200\times $, and$226\times $speedups and$151\times $,$37\times $, and$156\times $energy savings compared to systems using near memory compute for the data filtering, sorting, and SpGEMM applications, respectively.