NexusCIM: High-Throughput Multi-CIM Array Architecture with C-Mesh NoC and Hub Cores

This paper introduces a high-performance Nexus-CIM architecture based on C-mesh NoC and hub cores. Conventional multi-CIM array architectures typically adopted mesh-type NoC structure. However, the mesh NoC shows NoC traffic congestion in the layer pipeline because multiple PEs must simultaneously communicate with each other, thereby leading to the PE-to-PE data communication bottleneck. To mitigate such a problem, we use the hub core instead of the previous vanilla router designs, and the hub core reduces the communication bottleneck by performing arithmetic operations such as aggregation. As a result, our NexusCIM shows higher throughput than baseline NoC designs by 1.04-8.9×.