PUDTune: Multi-Level Charging for High-Precision Calibration in Processing-Using-DRAM

Recently, practical analog in-memory computing has been realized using unmodified commercial DRAM modules. The underlying Processing-Using-DRAM (PUD) techniques enable high-throughput bitwise operations directly within DRAM arrays. However, the presence of inherent error-prone columns hinders PUD’s practical adoption. While selectively using only error-free columns would ensure reliability, this approach significantly reduces PUD’s computational throughput. This letter presents PUDTune, a novel high-precision calibration technique for increasing the number of error-free columns in PUD. PUDTune compensates for errors by applying pre-identified column-specific offsets to PUD operations. By leveraging multi-level charge states of DRAM cells, PUDTune generates fine-grained and wide-range offset variations despite the limited available rows. Our experiments with DDR4 DRAM demonstrate that PUDTune increases the number of error-free columns by 1.81× compared to conventional implementations, improving addition and multiplication throughput by 1.88× and 1.89× respectively.