Re-Meltrix: A Reconfigurable Processing-in-Memory Architecture Based on RRAM and Function Synthesis

The reconfigurable processing-in-memory (PIM) architecture has garnered significant attention in recent years due to its versatility and ability to overcome storage limitations. However, it faces challenges, such as overly complex mapping and routing caused by the fine granularity of basic logic units, and the inclusion of numerous redundant devices to achieve reconfigurability. To address these issues, we have designed a software-hardware co-design reconfigurable PIM architecture called Re-Meltrix. Its hardware architecture uses an resistive random-access memory array as the foundation, combined with well-designed peripheral circuits. Maintaining a controllable area, it integrates logic, storage, ternary content-address memory, and interconnection modes into a unified tile architecture and implements two-level independent interconnection within and between tiles. This approach achieves a single tile logic capacity multiple times that of the most advanced reconfigurable PIM architectures currently available, thereby resolving mapping and routing difficulties at the hardware level. Our proposed function synthesis, combined with the hardware architecture, specifically optimizes two-level interconnection separation and module segmentation, further reducing interconnection complexity and improving tile usage efficiency. Experiments have demonstrated that our architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art Liquid Silicon by 2.00–<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4.31\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> in performance and reduces power consumption by 29%–68%. Compared with the previously published Meltrix, the area has decreased by 15%–35%, with the area and power consumption remaining almost unchanged.