Digital-based Processing In-Memory: A Highly-Parallel Accelerator for Data Intensive Applications

Recently, Processing In-Memory (PIM) has been shown as a promising solution to address data movement issue in the current processors. However, today's PIM technologies are mostly analog-based, which involve both scalability and efficiency issues. In this paper, we propose a novel digital-based PIM which accelerates fundamental operations and diverse data analytic procedures using processing in-memory technology. Instead of sending a large amount of data to the processing cores for computation, our design performs a large part of computation tasks inside the memory; thus the application performance can be accelerated significantly by avoiding the memory access bottleneck. Digital-based PIM supports bit-wise operations between two selected bit-line of the memory block and then extends it to support row-parallel arithmetic operations.