Practical Challenges in Supporting Function in Memory

The performance of computer systems is often limited by the bandwidth of their memory channels, but further increasing the bandwidth is challenging under the stringent pin and power constraints of packages. To further increase performance under these constraints, various processing-in-memory (or function-in-memory) architectures, which tightly integrate processing functions with DRAM devices using 3D/2.5D-stacking technology, have been proposed. However, they have not been successfully commercialized by the industry yet because of various technical and practical challenges. In this article for the plenary talk, I will briefly discuss what challenges have been overlooked by researchers to shed light on successful commercialization and wide adoption of processing-in-memory architecture.