Salonik Resch

Yang Lv, Brandon R. Zink, Robert P. Bloom et al.

Conventional computing paradigm struggles to fulfill the rapidly growing demands from emerging applications, especially those for machine intelligence, because much of the power and energy is consumed by constant data transfers between logic and memory modules. A new paradigm, called "computational random-access memory (CRAM)" has emerged to address this fundamental limitation. CRAM performs logic operations directly using the memory cells themselves, without having the data ever leave the memory. The energy and performance benefits of CRAM for both conventional and emerging applications have been well established by prior numerical studies. However, there lacks an experimental demonstration and study of CRAM to evaluate its computation accuracy, which is a realistic and application-critical metrics for its technological feasibility and competitiveness. In this work, a CRAM array based on magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) is experimentally demonstrated. First, basic memory operations as well as 2-, 3-, and 5-input logic operations are studied. Then, a 1-bit full adder with two different designs is demonstrated. Based on the experimental results, a suite of modeling has been developed to characterize the accuracy of CRAM computation. Scalar addition, multiplication, and matrix multiplication, which are essential building blocks for many conventional and machine intelligence applications, are evaluated and show promising accuracy performance. With the confirmation of MTJ-based CRAM's accuracy, there is a strong case that this technology will have a significant impact on power- and energy-demanding applications of machine intelligence.

Salonik Resch, Zamshed I. Chowdhury, Husrev Cilasun et al.

Beyond edge devices can function off the power grid and without batteries, enabling them to operate in difficult to access regions. However, energy costly long-distance communication required for reporting results or offloading computation becomes a limitation. Here, we reduce this overhead by developing a beyond edge device which can effectively act as a nearby server to offload computation. For security reasons, this device must operate on encrypted data, which incurs a high overhead. We use energy-efficient and intermittent-safe in-memory computation to enable this encrypted computation, allowing it to provide a speedup for beyond edge applications within a power budget of a few milliWatts.