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CMOS technology and its continuous scaling have made electronics and computers accessible and affordable for almost everyone on the globe; in addition, they have enabled the solutions of a wide range of societal problems and applications. Today, however, both the technology and the computer architectures are facing severe challenges/walls making them incapable of providing the demanded computing power with tight constraints. This motivates the need for the exploration of novel architectures based on new device technologies; not only to sustain the financial benefit of technology scaling, but also to develop solutions for extremely demanding emerging applications. This paper presents two computation-in-memory based accelerators making use of emerging memristive devices; they are Memristive Vector Processor and RRAM Automata Processor. The preliminary results of these two accelerators show significant improvement in terms of latency, energy and area as compared to today's architectures and design.

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Technological and architectural improvements have been constantly required to sustain the demand of faster and cheaper computers. However, CMOS down-scaling is suffering from three technology walls: leakage wall, reliability wall, and cost wall. On top of that, a performance increase due to architectural improvements is also gradually saturating due to three well-known architecture walls: memory wall, power wall, and instruction-level parallelism (ILP) wall. Hence, a lot of research is focusing on proposing and developing new technologies and architectures. In this article, we present a comprehensive classification of memory-centric computing architectures; it is based on three metrics: computation location, level of parallelism, and used memory technology. The classification not only provides an overview of existing architectures with their pros and cons but also unifies the terminology that uniquely identifies these architectures and highlights the potential future architectures that can be further explored. Hence, it sets up a direction for future research in the field.

The analytical model of thermally induced diffraction losses for a Gaussian pump beam are derived as functions of the mode-to-pump ratio and pump power in end-pumped Nd-doped lasers considering the energy transfer upconversion effects. The mode-to-pump ratio is optimized based on it. The results show that the optimum mode-to-pump ratio with the thermally induced diffraction losses is less than 0.65, and it is less than the results in which the thermally induced diffraction losses are neglected. The theoretical model is applied to a diode-end-pumped Nd:GdVO4 laser operating at 1342 nm, and the theoretical calculations are in good agreement with the experimental results.

One of the most important constraints of today's architectures for data-intensive applications is the limited bandwidth due to the memory-processor communication bottleneck. This significantly impacts performance and energy. For instance, the energy consumption share of communication and memory access may exceed 80%. Recently, the concept of Computation-in-Memory (CIM) was proposed, which is based on the integration of storage and computation in the same physical location using a crossbar topology and non-volatile resistive-switching memristor technology. To illustrate the tremendous potential of CIM architecture in exploiting massively parallel computation while reducing the communication overhead, we present a communicationefficient mapping of a large-scale matrix multiplication algorithm on the CIM architecture. The experimental results show that, depending on the matrix size, CIM architecture exhibits several orders of magnitude higher performance in total execution time and two orders of magnitude better in total energy consumption than the multicore-based on the shared memory architecture.

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