HW/SW Co-Design for Reliable TCAM- Based In-Memory Brain-Inspired Hyperdimensional Computing

Brain-inspired hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is continuously gaining remarkable attention. It is a promising alternative to traditional machine-learning approaches due to its ability to learn from little data, lightweight implementation, and resiliency against errors. However, HDC is overwhelmingly data-centric similar to traditional machine-learning algorithms. In-memory computing is rapidly emerging to overcome the von Neumann bottleneck by eliminating data movements between compute and storage units. In this work, we investigate and model the impact of imprecise in-memory computing hardware, namely TCAM cells, on the inference accuracy of HDC. Our modeling is based on 14nm FinFET technology fully calibrated with Intel measurement data. We accurately model, for the first time, the voltage-dependent error probability in SRAM-based and FeFET-based in-memory computing. Thanks to HDC's resiliency against errors, the complexity of the underlying hardware can be reduced, providing large energy savings of up to 6x. Experimental results for SRAM reveal that variability-induced errors have a probability of up to 39%. Despite such a high error probability, the inference accuracy is only marginally impacted. This opens doors to explore new tradeoffs. We also demonstrate that the resiliency against errors is application-dependent. In addition, we investigate the robustness of HDC against errors with emerging non-volatile FeFET devices instead of mature CMOS-based SRAMs. We demonstrate that inference accuracy does remain high despite the larger error probability, while large area and power savings can be obtained.
All in all, HW/SW co-design is the key for efficient yet reliable in-memory HDC for both conventional CMOS technology and upcoming emerging technologies.