With the increased attention to memristive-based in-memory analog computing (IMAC) architectures as an alternative for energy-hungry computer systems for machine learning applications, a tool that enables exploring their device- and circuit-level design space can significantly boost the research and development in this area. Thus, in this paper, we develop IMAC-Sim, a circuit-level simulator for the design space exploration of IMAC architectures. IMAC-Sim is a Python-based simulation framework, which creates the SPICE netlist of the IMAC circuit based on various device- and circuit-level hyperparameters selected by the user, and automatically evaluates the accuracy, power consumption, and latency of the developed circuit using a user-specified dataset. Moreover, IMAC-Sim simulates the interconnect parasitic resistance and capacitance in the IMAC architectures and is also equipped with horizontal and vertical partitioning techniques to surmount these reliability challenges. IMAC-Sim is a flexible tool that supports a broad range of device- and circuit-level hyperparameters. In this paper, we perform controlled experiments to exhibit some of the important capabilities of the IMAC-Sim, while the entirety of its features is available for researchers via an open-source tool.

翻译：随着基于忆阻器的存内模拟计算（IMAC）架构作为机器学习应用中高能耗计算机系统的替代方案受到日益关注，一种能够探索其器件级与电路级设计空间的工具将显著推动该领域的研究与发展。为此，本文开发了IMAC-Sim——一种用于IMAC架构设计空间探索的电路级仿真器。IMAC-Sim是基于Python的仿真框架，可根据用户选择的多种器件级与电路级超参数生成IMAC电路的SPICE网表，并利用用户指定的数据集自动评估所开发电路的精度、功耗与延迟。此外，IMAC-Sim仿真了IMAC架构中的互连寄生电阻与电容，并配备水平和垂直划分技术以克服这些可靠性挑战。IMAC-Sim是一款灵活的工具，支持广泛的器件级与电路级超参数。本文通过受控实验展示了IMAC-Sim的部分重要功能，而其全部特性已通过开源工具向研究人员开放。