Logic-in-Memory Computing | Andrea Coluccio | PitchD 27
Channel: IEEE PoliTO Student Branch
Date: 24/10/2020

PitchD – the PhD’s pitch: our PhD IEEE Student Members explain to students, colleagues and professors their research.

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Logic-in-Memory computing: an architectural solution to solve the von Neumann bottleneck

Mr. Andrea Coluccio, Dept. of Electronics and Telecommunications (DET), Politecnico di Torino

Nowadays, computer architectures are widely studied in the literature. The von Neumann scheme, which is essentially composed of CPU and memory, is the most adopted structure. Both elements have made significant improvements in terms of performance: CPUs are becoming faster and more efficient over the years, achieving high clock frequencies and multitasking capabilities. However, memory cannot follow the trend of the CPU in terms of computational speed, so the communication between these two elements represents a bottleneck: a lot of power, energy, and execution time are wasted only to wait for the data from memory. This phenomenon is called the von Neumann bottleneck. What could we do to reduce this drawback? Logic-in-Memory (LiM) could be a solution: it merges storage and computation, so instead of moving data back and forth in the memory hierarchy, calculations are performed directly inside the memory array, reducing the data traffic and improving the performance.