CCacheSim: A Circuit-Architecture Cross-Level Simulation Framework for SRAM-Based in-Cache Computing System Evaluation

SRAM-based Compute-In-Memory (CIM) circuits have demonstrated significant performance and energy efficiency advantages. Although numerous frameworks or tools have emerged for simulating CIM-based systems, most frameworks are tailored for specific DNN accelerators and rarely consider SRAM-CIM solutions in general processor systems because it is difficult to establish an effective mechanism to build the CIM data path to integrate the SRAM-CIM module that is tightly coupled with the cache hierarchy into the system. To address this problem, we propose a circuit-architecture cross-level simulation framework named CCacheSim for in-cache computing system. CCacheSim integrates the simulation of SRAM-CIM circuit timing and energy consumption characteristics, providing circuit-level accuracy evaluation support for in-cache computing system simulations. For the circuit level, the SRAM-CIM model can automatically generate a circuit-level netlist and conduct accurate simulation through corresponding configurations, thus balancing accuracy and agility for early design exploration. For the architectural level, to efficiently support the portable integration of SRAM-CIM module to in-cache computing system, a configurable hardware programming interface is implemented within the cache model to manage the interaction of the control stream between processor and cache for CIM tasks. Moreover, a request queue based access mechanism is proposed to ensure the completeness of the operands required by CIM tasks. To validate the proposed framework, CCacheSim is implemented to simulate varying configurations of in-cache computing systems and SRAM-CIM modules. The results prove that CCacheSim can conduct accurate performance and energy consumption evaluation for given processor architecture with given CIM module. CCacheSim can support flexible and effective design space exploration for in-cache computing system.