doi: 10.7873/DATE.2015.0582

ABSTRACT

Data analytics such as face recognition involves large volume of image data, and hence leads to grand challenge on mobile platform design with strict power requirement. Emerging non-volatile STT-MRAM has the minimum leakage power and comparable speed to SRAM, and hence is considered as a promising candidate for data-oriented mobile computing. However, there exists significantly higher write-energy for STT-MRAM when compared to the SRAM. Based on the use of STTMRAM, this paper introduces an energy-efficient non-volatile in-memory accelerator for a sparse-representation based face recognition algorithm. We find that by projecting high-dimension image data to much lower dimension, the current scaling for STT-MRAM write operation can be applied aggressively, which leads to significant power reduction yet maintains quality-of-service for face recognition. Specifically, compared to a baseline with SRAM, leakage power and dynamic power are reduced by 91.4% and 79% respectively with only slight compromise on recognition rate.

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