Logic Design Within Memristive Memories Using Memristor-Aided loGIC (MAGIC)

Realizing logic operations within passive crossbar memory arrays is a promising approach to enable novel computer architectures, different from conventional von Neumann architecture. Attractive candidates to enable such architectures are memristors, nonvolatile memory elements commonly used within a crossbar, that can also perform logic operations. In such novel architectures, data are stored and processed within the same entity, which we term as memristive
memory processing unit
(
MPU
). In this paper, Memristor-Aided loGIC (MAGIC) family is discussed with various design considerations and novel techniques to execute logic within an MPU. We present a novel resistive memory—the
transpose memory
, which adds additional functionality to the memristive memory, and compare it with a conventional memristive memory. A case study of an adder is presented to demonstrate the design issues discussed in this paper. We compare the proposed design techniques with the memristive IMPLY logic in terms of speed, area, and energy. Our evaluation shows that the proposed MAGIC design is 2.4
$\times$
faster and consumes 66.3% less energy as compared with the IMPLY-based computing for N-bit addition within memristive crossbar memory. Additionally, we compare the proposed design with IMPLY logic family on ISCAS-85 benchmarks, which shows significant improvements in speed (2
$\times$
) and energy (10
$\times$
), with similar area.