In-Memory Mirroring: Cloning Without Reading

In-memory computing (IMC) has gained signifi- cant attention recently as it attempts to reduce the impact of memory bottlenecks. Numerous schemes for digital IMC are presented in the literature, focusing on logic operations. Often, an application's description has data dependencies that must be resolved. Contemporary IMC architectures perform read followed by write operations for this purpose, which results in performance and energy penalties. To solve this fundamental problem, this paper presents in-memory mirroring (IMM). IMM eliminates the need for read and write-back steps, thus avoiding energy and performance penalties. Instead, we perform data movement within memory, involving row-wise and column-wise data transfers. Additionally, the IMM scheme enables parallel cloning of entire row (word) with a complexity of O(1). Moreover, we analyzed the energy consumption of the proposed technique on an RRAM crossbar with an experimentally validated JART VCM v1b model. The IMM increases energy efficiency and shows 2x performance improvement compared to conventional data movement methods.