Gradient descent-based programming of analog in-memory computing cores
Julian Büchel a, Athanasios Vasilopoulos a, Benedikt Kersting a, Frederic Odermatt a, Kevin Brew b, Injo Ok b, Sam Choi b, Iqbal Saraf b, Victor Chan b, Timothy Philip b, Nicole Saulnier b, Vijay Narayanan c, Manuel Le-Gallo Bourdeau a, Abu Sebastian a
a IBM Research Europe – Zurich, Säumerstrasse 4, Ruschlikon, Switzerland
b IBM Research Albany, NY, USA
c IBM Research Yorktown Heights, NY, USA
Proceedings of Neuromorphic Materials, Devices, Circuits and Systems (NeuMatDeCaS)
VALÈNCIA, Spain, 2023 January 23rd - 25th
Organizers: Rohit Abraham John, Irem Boybat, Jason Eshraghian and Simone Fabiano
Contributed talk, Julian Büchel, presentation 031
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.neumatdecas.2023.031
Publication date: 9th January 2023

The precise programming of crossbar arrays of unit cells is crucial for obtaining high matrix-vector-multiplication (MVM) accuracy in analog in-memory computing (AIMC) cores. We propose a radically different approach based on directly minimizing the MVM error using gradient descent with synthetic random input data. Our method significantly reduces the MVM error compared with conventional unit cell by unit cell iterative programming. It also eliminates the need for high-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) to read the small unit-cell conductance during programming. Our method improves the experimental inference accuracy of ResNet-9 implemented on two phase-change memory (PCM)-based AIMC cores by 1.26%.

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