Tutorial: RAM-based Circuits and Architectures for Multimedia and Signal Processing SOCs

In recent years, a growing class of SOCs has emerged for mobile applications, such as portable desktops, digital pens, audio- and video-based multimedia products, wireless communications and imaging systems, personal digital assistants, personal communicators and smart cards. These SOCs demand high-speed, high-throughput computations, complex functionalities and often real-time processing capabilities. The performance of these SOCs is mostly limited by lifetime of batteries. Thus, new design approaches and methodologies that produce more power-efficient and higher throughput designs are greatly desired. In recent years, the use of SIMD (single instruction multiple data) or MIMD (multiple instruction multiple data) architectures is spreading into the general DSP domain due to recent innovations that boost performance and flexibility of the architectures by several orders of magnitude. The Processor-in-Memory (PIM) environment provides a unique prospective because the impact of low-power techniques on performance is more sensitive in PIM than in standard RAM. The performance balancing in PIM architectures plays a critical role. Even though PIM concept is not new, recent breakthroughs pushed the application domain from traditional multimedia use to general signal processing use. This tutorial provides a unique overview and prospective of these recent developments to a much broader audience. The tutorial covers recent developments presented in literature and the most recent advances proposed by the author and his research group.