RRAM-based analog approximate computing

Abstract—Approximate computing is a promising design paradigm for better performance and power efficiency. In this paper, we propose a power efficient framework for analog approximate computing with the emerging metal-oxide resistive switching random-access memory (RRAM) devices. A programmable RRAM-based approximate computing unit (RRAM-ACU) is introduced first to accelerate approximated computation, and an approximate computing framework with scalability is then proposed on top of the RRAM-ACU. In order to program the RRAM-ACU efficiently, we also present a detailed configuration flow, which includes a customized approxima-tor training scheme, an approximator-parameter-to-RRAM-state mapping algorithm, and an RRAM state tuning scheme. Finally, the proposed RRAM-based computing framework is modeled at system level. A predictive compact model is developed to esti-mate the configuration overhead of RRAM-ACU and help explore the application scenarios of RRAM-based analog approximate computing. The simulation results on a set of diverse bench-marks demonstrate that, compared with a x86-64 CPU at 2 GHz, the RRAM-ACU is able to achieve 4.06–196.41 × speedup and power efficiency of 24.59–567.98 GFLOPS/W with quality loss of 8.72 % on average. And the implementation of hierarchical model and X application demonstrates that the proposed RRAM-based approximate computing framework can achieve>12.8× power efficiency than its pure digital implementation counter-parts (CPU, graphics processing unit, and field- programmable gate arrays). Index Terms—Approximate computing, neural network, power efficiency, resistive random-access memory (RRAM). I