Energy-Efficient STT-MRAM based Digital PIM supporting Vertical Computations Using Sense Amplifier

Digital processing-in-memory (PIM) design has been actively researched since it does not need analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) that incur large area and energy consumption. However, due to the limited data flow of digital PIM, the data movement between memory cells still incurs significant energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient spin-transfer torque (STT)-MRAM based digital PIM architecture, which can support the computations between different memory cells in column-wise and row-wise. The column-wise directional computation is enabled by employing current summation, and it can diversify the data flow of digital PIM, thus efficiently reducing the number of data movement between memory cells. The simulations with 28nm CMOS process show that the proposed digital PIM architecture achieves the energy saving of 43.7
^%
compared to the state-of art architecture.