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Abstract

The increasing ubiquity of edge devices in the consumer market, along with their ever more computationally expensive workloads, necessitate corresponding increases in computing power to support such workloads. In-memory computing is attractive in edge devices as it reuses preexisting memory elements, thus limiting area overhead. Additionally, in-SRAM Computing (iSC) efficiently performs computations on spatially local data found in a variety of emerging edge device workloads. We therefore propose, implement, and benchmark BLADE, a BitLine Accelerator for Devices on the Edge. BLADE is an iSC architecture that can perform massive SIMD-like complex operations on hundreds to thousands of operands simultaneously. We implement BLADE in 28nm CMOS and demonstrate its functionality down to 0.6V, lower than any conventional state-of-the-art iSC architecture. We also benchmark BLADE in conjunction with a full Linux software stack in the gem5 architectural simulator, providing a robust demonstration of its performance gain in comparison to an equivalent embedded processor equipped with a NEON SIMD co-processor. We benchmark BLADE with three emerging edge device workloads, namely cryptography, high efficiency video coding, and convolutional neural networks, and demonstrate 4x, 6x, and 3x performance improvement, respectively, in comparison to a baseline CPU/NEON processor at an equivalent power budget.

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