Challenges and Opportunities for Computing-in-Memory Chips

In recent years, artificial neural networks have been applied to many scenarios, from daily life applications like face detection, to industry problems like placement and routing in physical design. Neural network inference mainly contains multiply-accumulate operations, which requires huge amount of data movement. Traditional Von-Neumann architecture computers are inefficient for neural networks as they have separate CPU and memory, and data transfer between them costs excessive energy and performance. To address this problem, in-memory or near-memory computing have been proposed and attracted much attention in both academic and industry. In this talk, we will give a brief review of non-volatile memory crossbar-based computing-in-memory architecture. Next, we will demonstrate the challenges for chips with such architecture to replace current CPUs/GPUs for neural network processing, from an industry perspective. Lastly, we will discuss possible solutions for those challenges.