Opportunities and Limitations of Emerging Analog in-Memory Compute DNN Architectures

This paper assesses the benefits and pitfalls of Analog in-Memory Compute (AiMC) solutions from the accelerator level. The study shows that AiMC can improve efficiency significantly, yet only when the AiMC array topology and the memory technology are co-optimized with the memory and system architecture. The paper provides design guidelines to maximally exploit the opportunities of AiMC technology, and gives an outlook towards emerging memory technologies.