CiM3D: Comparator-in-memory designs using monolithic 3-D technology for accelerating data-intensive applications

The compare operation is widely used in many applications, from fundamental sorting to primitive operations in the database and AI systems. We present SRAM-based 3-D-CAM circuit designs using a monolithic 3-D (M3D) integration process for realizing beyond-Boolean in-memory compare operation without any area overheads. We also fabricated a processing-in-memory (PiM) macro with the same 3-D-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 3-D-CAM supporting operations, such as data filtering, sorting, and sparse matrix-matrix multiplication (SpGEMM). Our systems exhibit up to 272 ×, 200 ×, and 226 × speedups and 151 ×, 37 ×, and 156 × energy savings compared to systems using near memory compute for the data filtering, sorting, and SpGEMM applications, respectively.