SRMC: A Multibit Memristor Crossbar for Self-Renewing Image Mask

A recent surge of research on deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) has given a challenge on existing computation architecture which has the flows in speed and memory bottleneck. In the pretreatment of deep learning, mask operation is frequently used to remove noise or fetch information. However, under data-intensive conditions, applying mask frequently can put an extremely heavy memory/communication burden on computing system. An efficient substrate of DCNN for ameliorating mask operation is urgently needed. In this paper, we present a self-renewing mask circuit (SRMC) to alleviate/solve earlier problems. First, a new approach to apply mask is presented based on computation-in-memory architecture that implements high-performance processor and high-density memory in the same physical location. Second, we designed the peripheral circuit which can provide self-renewing function to further avoid the data exchange with an external space. As opposed to most other computational element, which calculates two 1-bit data, the proposed SRMC storage multibit value and calculate several of them parallel. The calculating ability of SRMC is significantly superior to those of computational element in general architectures. Moreover, mean filter and edge detector are implemented to illustrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed circuit. Finally, we discussed two possible methods to enhance the practicability of our scheme.