Defect Tolerant Logic Synthesis for Memristor Crossbars with Performance Evaluation

In this paper, we study defect-tolerant logic synthesis of memristor-based crossbar architectures. We propose a hybrid algorithm, combining heuristic and exact algorithms, that achieves perfect tolerance for 10-percent stuck-at open defect rates. Along with defect tolerance, we also consider area, delay, and power costs of the memristor crossbars to elaborate on two-level and multi-level logic designs.This work is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 691178, and supported by the TUBITAK-Career project #113E76

Estimating dynamic power consumption for memristor-based CiM architecture

Nowadays, Computing-in-Memory (CiM) represents one of the most relevant solutions to deal with CMOS technological issues and several works have been proposed so far targeting front and back-end synthesis. However, a given CiM architecture can be synthesized depending on different parameters, leading to different implementations w.r.t. area, power consumption and performance. It is thus mandatory to have an evaluation framework to characterize the actual implementation depending on the above terms. This is even more important during the Design Exploration phase, in which many different implementations are explored to identify the best candidate w.r.t. the user requirements. In this work, we focus on the dynamic power consumption estimation of a given CiM implementation. Instead of resorting to a simulation-based power estimation, we propose an analytical approach that will dramatically speed up the estimation since no simulations are required. By comparing the proposed approach against the simulation-based method over a massive experimental campaign, we show that the accuracy of the estimation turns out to be very high