XbarSim: A Decomposition-Based Memristive Crossbar Simulator

TL;DR

This paper introduces XbarSim, a domain-specific circuit-level simulator designed to analyze the nodal equations of memristive crossbars, and demonstrates that the XbarSim can achieve orders of magnitude speedup compared to HSPICE across various sizes of memristive crossbars.

Abstract

Given the growing focus on memristive crossbar-based in-memory computing (IMC) architectures as a potential alternative to current energy-hungry machine learning hardware, the availability of a fast and accurate circuit-level simulation framework could greatly enhance research and development efforts in this field. This paper introduces XbarSim, a domain-specific circuit-level simulator designed to analyze the nodal equations of memristive crossbars. The first version of XbarSim, proposed herein, leverages the lower-upper (LU) decomposition approach to solve the nodal equations for the matrices associated with crossbars. The XbarSim is capable of simulating interconnect parasitics within crossbars and supports batch processing of the inputs. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the XbarSim can achieve orders of magnitude speedup compared to HSPICE across various sizes of memristive crossbars. The XbarSim's full suite of features is accessible to researchers as an open-source tool.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: The crossbar architecture badcrossbar.
• Figure 2: Notion used in crossbar matrix.
• Figure 3: Example of a matrix formed from nodal equations for a 4 by 3 crossbar.
• Figure 4: Positions of nonzero elements in generated matrix.
• Figure 5: Simulation time for various $m\times n$ crossbars