Robust and High-Performance 12-T Interlocked SRAM for In-Memory Computing

In this paper, we analyze the existing SRAM based In-Memory Computing(IMC) proposals and show through exhaustive simulations that they fail under process variations. 6-T SRAM, 8-T SRAM, and 10-T SRAM based IMC architectures suffer from compute-disturb (stored data flips during IMC), compute-failure (provides false computation results), and half-select failures, respectively. To circumvent these issues, we propose a novel 12-T Dual Port Dual Interlockedstorage Cell (DPDICE) SRAM. DPDICE SRAM based IMC architecture(DPDICE-IMC) can perform essential boolean functions successfully in a single cycle and can perform basic arithmetic operations such as add and multiply. The most striking feature is that DPDICE-IMC architecture can perform IMC on two datasets simultaneously, thus doubling the throughput. Cumulatively, the proposed DPDICE-IMC is 26.7%, 8×, and 28% better than 6-T SRAM, 8-T SRAM, and 10-T SRAM based IMC architectures, respectively.