Charge-trap synaptic device with polycrystalline silicon channel for low power in-memory computing

Abstract Processing-in-memory (PIM) is gaining tremendous research and commercial interest because of its potential to replace the von Neumann bottleneck in current computing architectures. In this study, we implemented a PIM hardware architecture (circuit) based on the charge-trap flash (CTF) as a synaptic device. The PIM circuit with a CT memory performed exceedingly well by reducing the inference energy in the synapse array. To evaluate the image recognition accuracy, a Visual Geometry Group (VGG)-8 neural network was used for training, using the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)-10 dataset for off-chip learning applications. In addition to the system accuracy for neuromorphic applications, the energy efficiency, computing efficiency, and latency were closely investigated in the presumably integrated PIM architecture. Simulations that were performed incorporated cycle-to-cycle device variations, synaptic array size, and technology node scaling, along with other hardware-sense considerations.