SMART-AIMC: Sensitivity-Aware Mixed ADC Resolution with Fine-Grained Tunability for Analog In-Memory Computing

arXiv:2611.01707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Analog In-Memory Computing (IMC) is a promising paradigm for accelerating GEMM-based AI workloads by executing computations directly within the memory array in the analog domain. While IMC delivers substantial energy and throughput improvements, it can suffer from significant task accuracy degradation due to analog-to-digital converter (ADC) quantization noise, which occurs at the GEMM output and is thus different from weight/activation quantization, which occurs at the GEMM input. Mixed ADC resolution allows IMC modules to choose between high- and low-resolution ADC modes with different energy costs, offering a compelling accuracy-energy trade-off.