Single-Pass: An Operation Unit-Based In-Memory Computing Architecture for Sparse Neural Networks

Compute-in-memory (CIM) has emerged as a prominent research focus in recent years, offering a promising alternative for advancing traditional von Neumann architecture computers. However, the extensive array structures and peripheral circuits inherent in CIM introduce challenges related to latency and power consumption. The operation unit (OU) has gained attention as a practical solution to these issues, significantly transforming the computational paradigm of in-memory computing. Despite its potential, the possibilities enabled by this approach remain underexplored. This article presents a novel architecture, single-pass, designed around OU implementation with a new OU partitioning method optimized for sparse networks. Additionally, we propose a matrix compression technique leveraging a dual heuristic greedy algorithm (DHGA), forming the foundation of our architecture-specific mapping strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that, within given area constraints, our architecture achieves an average energy efficiency improvement of 29.8% and a speedup of 82.3% across various networks compared to the baseline.