John Paul Strachan

Jiaao Yu, Paul-Philipp Manea, Sara Ameli et al.

Recent breakthroughs in associative memories suggest that silicon memories are coming closer to human memories, especially for memristive Content Addressable Memories (CAMs) which are capable to read and write in analog values. However, the Program-Verify algorithm, the state-of-the-art memristor programming algorithm, requires frequent switching between verifying and programming memristor conductance, which brings many defects such as high dynamic power and long programming time. Here, we propose an analog feedback-controlled memristor programming circuit that makes use of a novel look-up table-based (LUT-based) programming algorithm. With the proposed algorithm, the programming and the verification of a memristor can be performed in a single-direction sequential process. Besides, we also integrated a single proposed programming circuit with eight analog CAM (aCAM) cells to build an aCAM array. We present SPICE simulations on TSMC 28nm process. The theoretical analysis shows that 1. A memristor conductance within an aCAM cell can be converted to an output boundary voltage in aCAM searching operations and 2. An output boundary voltage in aCAM searching operations can be converted to a programming data line voltage in aCAM programming operations. The simulation results of the proposed programming circuit prove the theoretical analysis and thus verify the feasibility to program memristors without frequently switching between verifying and programming the conductance. Besides, the simulation results of the proposed aCAM array show that the proposed programming circuit can be integrated into a large array architecture.

Ruibin Mao, Bo Wen, Yahui Zhao et al.

Lifelong on-device learning is a key challenge for machine intelligence, and this requires learning from few, often single, samples. Memory augmented neural network has been proposed to achieve the goal, but the memory module has to be stored in an off-chip memory due to its size. Therefore the practical use has been heavily limited. Previous works on emerging memory-based implementation have difficulties in scaling up because different modules with various structures are difficult to integrate on the same chip and the small sense margin of the content addressable memory for the memory module heavily limited the degree of mismatch calculation. In this work, we implement the entire memory augmented neural network architecture in a fully integrated memristive crossbar platform and achieve an accuracy that closely matches standard software on digital hardware for the Omniglot dataset. The successful demonstration is supported by implementing new functions in crossbars in addition to widely reported matrix multiplications. For example, the locality-sensitive hashing operation is implemented in crossbar arrays by exploiting the intrinsic stochasticity of memristor devices. Besides, the content-addressable memory module is realized in crossbars, which also supports the degree of mismatches. Simulations based on experimentally validated models show such an implementation can be efficiently scaled up for one-shot learning on the Mini-ImageNet dataset. The successful demonstration paves the way for practical on-device lifelong learning and opens possibilities for novel attention-based algorithms not possible in conventional hardware.

Nathan Leroux, Paul-Philipp Manea, Chirag Sudarshan et al.

Transformer networks, driven by self-attention, are central to Large Language Models. In generative Transformers, self-attention uses cache memory to store token projections, avoiding recomputation at each time step. However, GPU-stored projections must be loaded into SRAM for each new generation step, causing latency and energy bottlenecks. We present a custom self-attention in-memory computing architecture based on emerging charge-based memories called gain cells, which can be efficiently written to store new tokens during sequence generation and enable parallel analog dot-product computation required for self-attention. However, the analog gain cell circuits introduce non-idealities and constraints preventing the direct mapping of pre-trained models. To circumvent this problem, we design an initialization algorithm achieving text processing performance comparable to GPT-2 without training from scratch. Our architecture respectively reduces attention latency and energy consumption by up to two and five orders of magnitude compared to GPUs, marking a significant step toward ultra-fast, low-power generative Transformers.

Haesol Im, Fabian Böhm, Giacomo Pedretti et al.

The Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem is a computationally challenging decision problem central to many industrial applications. For SAT problems in cryptanalysis, circuit design, and telecommunication, solutions can often be found more efficiently by representing them with a combination of exclusive OR (XOR) and conjunctive normal form (CNF) clauses. We propose a hardware accelerator architecture that natively embeds and solves such hybrid XOR--CNF problems using in-memory computing hardware. To achieve this, we introduce an algorithm and demonstrate, both experimentally and through simulations, how it can be efficiently implemented with memristor crossbar arrays. Compared to the conventional approaches that translate XOR--CNF problems to pure CNF problems, our simulations show that the accelerator improves computation speed, energy efficiency, and chip area utilization of in-memory accelerators by $\sim$10$\times$ for a set of hard cryptographic benchmarking problems. Moreover, the accelerator achieves a $\sim$10$\times$ speedup and a $\sim$1000$\times$ gain in energy efficiency over state-of-the-art SAT solvers running on CPUs.

Haesol Im, Chan-Woo Yang, Moslem Noori et al.

Research into the development of special-purpose computing architectures designed to solve quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems has flourished in recent years. It has been demonstrated in the literature that such special-purpose solvers can outperform traditional complementary metal--oxide--semiconductor architectures by orders of magnitude with respect to timing metrics on synthetic problems. However, they face challenges with constrained problems such as the quadratic assignment problem (QAP), where mapping to binary formulations such as QUBO introduces overhead and limits parallelism. In-memory computing (IMC) devices, such as memristor-based analog Ising machines, offer significant speed-ups and efficiency gains over traditional CPU-based solvers, particularly for solving combinatorial optimization problems. In this work, we present a novel hardware-aware QAP optimization framework designed for IMC hardware. By co-designing the local search heuristic with the underlying hardware, we exploit the intrinsic massive parallelism that allows for computing of full neighbourhoods simultaneously to make update decisions. We ensure binary solutions remain feasible by selecting local moves that lead to neighbouring feasible solutions, leveraging feasible-space search heuristics and the underlying structure of a given problem. Our approach is compatible with both digital computers and analog hardware. We demonstrate its effectiveness in CPU implementations by comparing it with state-of-the-art heuristics for solving the QAP.

Paul-Philipp Manea, Aishwarya Natarajan, Jim Ignowski et al.

Analog content-addressable memories (aCAMs) based on memristors provide a promising pathway toward energy-efficient large-scale associative computing for Edge AI and embedded intelligence applications. They have been successfully applied to decision-tree inference and extend the capabilities of compute-in-memory (CIM) architectures beyond conventional vector-matrix multiplication. However, conventional designs such as the 6T2M architecture suffer from static search power, limited voltage gain, and pronounced match-line crosstalk, constraining analog precision and scalability. We introduce a strong-arm latched memristor (SALM) aCAM cell that replaces static voltage division with a dynamic current-race comparator, enabling high regenerative gain, intrinsic result latching, and near-zero static search power. Compared to 6T2M, SALM reduces read energy by 33% at identical latency while eliminating the gain and crosstalk limitations that prevent 6T2M from scaling to large arrays. SALM further enables scalable sequential and parallel latch sharing, and a dataset-aware optimization framework exposes an explicit energy-latency tradeoff, achieving up to 50% energy reduction at 3x latency across representative workloads. To enable architectural exploration, we develop a circuit-accurate behavioral model derived from SPICE lookup tables in 22 nm FD-SOI technology, capturing match-line dynamics and crosstalk. Integrated into the X-TIME decision-tree compiler, this framework demonstrates that SALM maintains near-software accuracy for high-dimensional datasets, whereas baseline designs degrade due to limited gain and cumulative crosstalk.

Dmitrii Dobrynin, Masoud Mohseni, John Paul Strachan

Optimizing or sampling complex cost functions of combinatorial optimization problems is a longstanding challenge across disciplines and applications. When employing family of conventional algorithms based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) such as simulated annealing or parallel tempering, one assumes homogeneous (equilibrium) temperature profiles across input. This instance independent approach was shown to be ineffective for the hardest benchmarks near a computational phase transition when the so-called overlap-gap-property holds. In these regimes conventional MCMC struggles to unfreeze rigid variables, escape suboptimal basins of attraction, and sample high-quality and diverse solutions. In order to mitigate these challenges, Nonequilibrium Nonlocal Monte Carlo (NMC) algorithms were proposed that leverage inhomogeneous temperature profiles thereby accelerating exploration of the configuration space without compromising its exploitation. Here, we employ deep reinforcement learning (RL) to train the nonlocal transition policies of NMC which were previously designed phenomenologically. We demonstrate that the resulting solver can be trained solely by observing energy changes of the configuration space exploration as RL rewards and the local minimum energy landscape geometry as RL states. We further show that the trained policies improve upon the standard MCMC-based and nonlocal simulated annealing on hard uniform random and scale-free random 4-SAT benchmarks in terms of residual energy, time-to-solution, and diversity of solutions metrics.

Sebastian Siegel, Ming-Jay Yang, Younes Bouhadjar et al.

Structured State Space models (SSM) have recently emerged as a new class of deep learning models, particularly well-suited for processing long sequences. Their constant memory footprint, in contrast to the linearly scaling memory demands of Transformers, makes them attractive candidates for deployment on resource-constrained edge-computing devices. While recent works have explored the effect of quantization-aware training (QAT) on SSMs, they typically do not address its implications for specialized edge hardware, for example, analog in-memory computing (AIMC) chips. In this work, we demonstrate that QAT can significantly reduce the complexity of SSMs by up to two orders of magnitude across various performance metrics. We analyze the relation between model size and numerical precision, and show that QAT enhances robustness to analog noise and enables structural pruning. Finally, we integrate these techniques to deploy SSMs on a memristive analog in-memory computing substrate and highlight the resulting benefits in terms of computational efficiency.

Shih-Chii Liu, John Paul Strachan, Arindam Basu

Operations typically used in machine learning al-gorithms (e.g. adds and soft max) can be implemented bycompact analog circuits. Analog Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) designs that implement these algorithms using techniques such as charge sharing circuits and subthreshold transistors, achieve very high power efficiencies. With the recent advances in deep learning algorithms, focus has shifted to hardware digital accelerator designs that implement the prevalent matrix-vector multiplication operations. Power in these designs is usually dominated by the memory access power of off-chip DRAM needed for storing the network weights and activations. Emerging dense non-volatile memory technologies can help to provide on-chip memory and analog circuits can be well suited to implement the needed multiplication-vector operations coupled with in-computing memory approaches. This paper presents abrief review of analog designs that implement various machine learning algorithms. It then presents an outlook for the use ofanalog circuits in low-power deep network accelerators suitable for edge or tiny machine learning applications.