A Distributed Emulation Environment for In-Memory Computing Systems
This work addresses the time-consuming process of device development for AI applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing emulation concepts.
The authors tackled the challenge of developing and integrating in-memory computing devices by proposing a distributed and expandable emulation system for rapid prototyping, with experimental results demonstrating its usefulness.
In-memory computing technology is used extensively in artificial intelligence devices due to lower power consumption and fast calculation of matrix-based functions. The development of such a device and its integration in a system takes a significant amount of time and requires the use of a real-time emulation environment, where various system aspects are analyzed, microcode is tested, and applications are deployed, even before the real chip is available. In this work, we present the architecture, the software development tools, and experimental results of a distributed and expandable emulation system for rapid prototyping of integrated circuits based on in-memory computing technologies. Presented experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed emulator.