An Energy-Efficient And High Throughput In-Memory Computing Bit-Cell With Excellent Robustness Under Process Variations For Binary Neural Network

In-memory computing (IMC) is a promising approach for energy cost reduction due to data movement between memory and processor for running data-intensive deep learning applications on the computing systems. Together with Binary Neural Network (BNN), IMC provides a viable solution for running deep neural networks at the edge devices with stringent memory and energy constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel 10T bit-cell with a back-end-of-line (BEOL) metal-oxide-metal (MOM) capacitor laid on pitch for in-memory computing. Our IMC bit-cell, when arranged in a memory array, performs binary convolution (XNOR followed by Bit-count operations) and binary activation generation operations. We show, when binary layers of BNN are mapped into our IMC arrays for MNIST digit classification, 98.75 accuracy with energy efficiency of 2193 TOPS/W and throughput of 22857 GOPS can be obtained. We determine the memory array size considering the word-line and bit-line nonidealities and show how these impact classification accuracy. We analyze the impact of process variations on classification accuracy and show how word-line pulse tunability provided by our design can be used to improve the robustness of classification under process variations.