A 6.86Tb/s Bandwidth SOT-MRAM Sensing Scheme with Configurable Full-Column Over Frequency Technique for Near Memory Computing

The proliferation of multimodal systems, which heavily rely on efficient visual backbone networks like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), is driving the adoption of Computing-in-Memory (CIM) architectures for edge deployment. Magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) is an attractive weight storage medium for such systems due to its non-volatility, inherent radiation hardness, and high-speed read/write potential. However, the computational performance of digital MRAM-CIM chips is bottlenecked by the MRAM read bandwidth, thereby precluding full utilization of its non-volatility and limiting overall energy efficiency, especially as network depth scales. To this end, we introduce a compact, dual-path-optimized full-column-readout sense amplifier (SA) for reliable reading, complemented by a stage-aware over-frequency scheme with algorithm retraining to preserve inferency accuracy. Simulation results of our Spin-Orbit-Torque (SOT)-MRAM design in a 32-channel CIM architecture show a bandwidth of 6.86 Tb/s and a read energy efficiency of 34.5 fJ/bit. This represents a 33.9× improvement in normalized bandwidth over previous cutting-edge designs.