MARADIV: Library of MAGIC-Based Approximate Restoring Array Divider Benchmark Circuits for In-Memory Computing Using Memristors

Among various arithmetic circuits, dividers are one of the costliest in terms of area, energy, and delay. Hence, approximate divider designs have been implemented to reduce their cost for error-resilient applications. However, approximate dividers based on memristors for in-memory computing (IMC) have not received any attention. In this brief, we propose a library of 16 by 8 approximate restoring array dividers suitable for memristor-based IMC that can be used as benchmark circuits. We developed these benchmark circuits by performing an exhaustive design space exploration based on functional approximation. We used the state-of-the-art mapping tool, SIMPLER, to perform the mapping of the divider design to the memristor crossbar. We identified the Pareto optimal approximate divider designs based on the MAGIC design style with varying output qualities. We compare our Pareto optimal designs with the existing state-of-the-art CMOS-based approximate divider designs when mapped to IMCs. We also performed a case study on two image processing applications. Overall we propose MARADIV, a library of MAGIC design style-based approximate restoring array divider benchmark circuits tailored for memristor-based IMC. We believe that MARADIV’s benchmark designs can be used for future research in this direction. Hence, all Pareto optimal approximate restoring array divider designs will be made available at https://github.com/agra-uni-bremen/tcasii2022-maradiv-lib .