Improving compute in-memory ECC reliability with successive correction

Compute in-memory (CIM) is an exciting technique that minimizes data transport, maximizes memory throughput, and performs computation on the bitline of memory sub-arrays. This is especially interesting for machine learning applications, where increased memory bandwidth and analog domain computation offer improved area and energy efficiency. Unfortunately, CIM faces new challenges traditional CMOS architectures have avoided. In this work, we explore the impact of device variation (calibrated with measured data on foundry RRAM arrays) and propose a new class of error correcting codes (ECC) for hard and soft errors in CIM. We demonstrate single, double, and triple error correction offering over 16,000× reduction in bit error rate over a design without ECC and over 427× over prior work, while consuming only 29.1% area and 26.3% power overhead.