BC-MVLiM: A Binary-Compatible Multi-Valued Logic-in-Memory Based on Memristive Crossbars

Logic-in-memory with memristive crossbars is an attractive approach for realizing beyond von Neumann architectures. Multi-valued logic (MVL) containing more than two logic levels can enhance the computing speed with reduced number of logic operations. In this paper, a binary-compatible multi valued logic-in-memory (BC-MVLiM) scheme is proposed with memristive dual-crossbars where both inputs and outputs are represented by the multi-level cells of memristors. Both of the binary and multiple-valued logic operations can be implemented in the proposed BC-MVLiM scheme depending on the radix of inputs. The proposed BC-MVLiM circuitry supports multiple row-wise and column-wise logic gates with multiple fan-ins and fan-outs for binary and ternary systems by leveraging both inter and intra-crossbar operations. Experimental results show that the proposed BC-MVLiM-based multi-digit adder enhances the computation speed by up to 76.10% and 83.82%, for binary and ternary systems, respectively, as compared with the previously published memristive logic designs. By preventing the errors from propagating across multiple stages, the error rate of proposed BC-MVLiM is also reduced by up to 98.20% compared to the previous memristive logic designs in the presence of device variations.