Hidden-ROM

Motivated by reducing the data transfer activities in data-intensive neural network computing, SRAM-based compute-in-memory (CiM) has made significant progress. Unfortunately, SRAM has low density and limited on-chip capacity. This makes the deployment of large models inefficient due to the frequent DRAM access to update the weight in SRAM. Recently, a ROM-based CiM design, YOLoC, reveals the unique opportunity of deploying a large-scale neural network in CMOS by exploring the intriguing high density of ROM. However, even though assisting SRAM has been adopted in YOLoC for task transfer within the same domain, it is still a big challenge to overcome the read-only limitation in ROM and enable more flexibility. Therefore, it is of paramount significance to develop new ROM-based CiM architectures and provide broader task space and model expansion capability for more complex tasks.