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research article

Blade: An in-Cache Computing Architecture for Edge Devices

Simon, William Andrew  
•
Qureshi, Yasir Mahmood  
•
Rios, Marco Antonio  
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2020
Ieee Transactions On Computers

Area and power constrained edge devices are increasingly utilized to perform compute intensive workloads, necessitating increasingly area and power efficient accelerators. In this context, in-SRAM computing performs hundreds of parallel operations on spatially local data common in many emerging workloads, while reducing power consumption due to data movement. However, in-SRAM computing faces many challenges, including integration into the existing architecture, arithmetic operation support, data corruption at high operating frequencies, inability to run at low voltages, and low area density. To meet these challenges, this work introduces BLADE, a BitLine Accelerator for Devices on the Edge. BLADE is an in-SRAM computing architecture that utilizes local wordline groups to perform computations at a frequency 2.8x higher than state-of-the-art in-SRAM computing architectures. BLADE is integrated into the cache hierarchy of low-voltage edge devices, and simulated and benchmarked at the transistor, architecture, and software abstraction levels. Experimental results demonstrate performance/energy gains over an equivalent NEON accelerated processor for a variety of edge device workloads, namely, cryptography (4x performance gain/6x energy reduction), video encoding (6x/2x), and convolutional neural networks (3x/1.5x), while maintaining the highest frequency/energy ratio (up to 2.2Ghz@1V) of any conventional in-SRAM computing architecture, and a low area overhead of less than 8%.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/TC.2020.2972528
Author(s)
Simon, William Andrew  
Qureshi, Yasir Mahmood  
Rios, Marco Antonio  
Levisse, Alexandre Sébastien Julien  
Zapater Sancho, Marina  
Atienza Alonso, David  
Date Issued

2020

Published in
Ieee Transactions On Computers
Volume

69

Issue

9

Start page

1349

End page

1363

Subjects

blades

•

random access memory

•

performance evaluation

•

benchmark testing

•

arrays

•

central processing unit

•

in-memory computing

•

in-sram computing

•

bitline computing

•

edge computing

•

sram

•

cell

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
ESL  
FunderGrant Number

H2020

801137

H2020

863337

H2020

725657

RelationURL/DOI

HasPart

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/264782

HasPart

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/265152
Available on Infoscience
February 5, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/165151
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