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Traditional computing hardware often encounters on-chip memory bottleneck on large-scale Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) applications. With its unique in-memory computing feature, resistive crossbar-based computing attracts researchers’ attention as a promising solution to the memory bottleneck issue in von Neumann architectures. However, the parasitic resistances in crossbar deviate its behavior from the ideal weighted summation operation. In large-scale implementations, the impact of parasitic resistances must be carefully considered and mitigated to ensure circuits’ functionality. In this work, we implemented and simulated CNNs on resistive crossbar circuits with consideration of parasitic resistances. Moreover, we carried out a new mapping scheme for high utilization of crossbar arrays on convolution, and a mitigation algorithm to mitigate parasitic resistances in CNN applications. The mitigation algorithm considers parasitic resistances as well as data/kernel patterns of each layer to minimize the computing error in crossbar-based convolutions of CNNs. We demonstrated the proposed methods with implementations of a 4-layer CNN on MNIST, and residual neural network (ResNet) (20, 32, and 56) on CIFAR-10. Simulation results show the proposed methods well mitigate the parasitic resistances in crossbars. With our methods, modern CNNs on crossbars can preserve ideal (software) level classification accuracy with 6-bit ADCs and DACs implementation.

ReRAM crossbar array as a high-parallel fast and energy-efficient structure attracts much attention, especially on the acceleration of Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference on one specific task. However, due to the high energy consumption of weight re-programming and the ReRAM cells’ low endurance problem, adapting the crossbar array for multiple tasks has not been well explored. In this paper, we propose XMA, a novel crossbar-aware shift-based mask learning method for multiple task adaption in the ReRAM crossbar DNN accelerator for the first time. XMA leverages the popular mask-based learning algorithm’s benefit to mitigate catastrophic forgetting and learn a task-specific, crossbar column-wise, and shift-based multi-level mask, rather than the most commonly used element-wise binary mask, for each new task based on a frozen backbone model. With our crossbar-aware design innovation, the required masking operation to adapt for a new task could be implemented in an existing crossbar-based convolution engine with minimal hardware/memory overhead and, more importantly, no need for power-hungry cell re-programming, unlike prior works. The extensive experimental results show that, compared with state-of-the-art multiple task adaption Piggyback method [1], XMA achieves 3.19% higher accuracy on average, while saving 96.6% memory overhead. Moreover, by eliminating cell re-programming, XMA achieves  4.3x higher energy efficiency than Piggyback.