No abstract

Compare operation is widely used in many applications, from fundamental sorting to primitive operations in the database and AI systems. We present SRAM-based 3D-CAM circuit designs using Monolithic 3D integration process (M3D) for realizing beyond-Boolean in-memory compare operation without any area overheads. We also fabricated a processing-in-memory (PiM) macro with the same 3D-CAM circuit using M3D for performing massively parallel compare operations used in the database, machine learning, and scientific applications. We show various system designs with the 3D-CAM supporting operations like data filtering, sorting, and sparse matrix-matrix multiplication (SpGEMM). Our systems exhibit up to 272x, 200x, 226x speedup and 151x, 37x, 156x energy savings compared to systems using near memory compute for the data filtering, sorting and SpGEMM applications, respectively.