A Hybrid CAM-SRAM Processing-in-Memory Architecture With Feature Level Sparsity for Attention Mechanisms

The attention mechanism has become increasingly popular due to its ability to capture complex dependencies, enabling models like transformers to achieve remarkable performance in large language models (LLMs), computer vision, and other domains. However, the mechanism faces challenges such as low arithmetic intensity, leading to frequent data movement, and long sequence lengths, which introduce a large amount of redundant information. To mitigate both data movement and computational overhead in attention mechanisms, we propose a hybrid CAM-SRAM processing-in-memory architecture. By leveraging the parallel search and sort capabilities of content-addressable memory (CAM) arrays, we achieve dynamic fine-grained sparsification on features with varying variance, reducing the number of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations in the matrix multiplication (MatMul). Furthermore, an approximate booth encoding is employed in our MAC unit to reduce the number of partial products and maintain the consistency of their signs. This eliminates the need for negation operations, simplifying the logic design. Experimental results show that, in different configurations, our feature-level sparsification scheme achieves over 80% sparsity with an acceptable accuracy drop. With sparsity up to 80%, our design achieves a performance of 0.252-1.26 TOPS and a power efficiency of 4.71-21.72 TOPS/W, operating at 1000 MHz on the TSMC 40nm process.