SHWCIM: A Scalable Heterogeneous Workload Computing-in-Memory Architecture

This study introduces HWCIM, a SRAM-based Computing-In-Memory core, and SHWCIM, a CIM-capable Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture, to enhance re-source utilization, multi-functionality, and on-chip memory size in SRAM-based CIM designs. Evaluated using the SMIC 55nm process, HWCIM achieves 1.6x lower power, 2.8x higher energy efficiency, and up to 4.1x smaller area compared to previous CIM and CGRA works. Additionally, SHWCIM delivers an average 105.9x speedup over existing CGRAs and consumes 2-5x less energy than the Nvidia A40 GPU on realistic workloads.