  The scaling of the already-matured CMOS technology is steadily approaching
its physical limit, motivating the quest for a suitable alternative. Cryogenic
operation offers a promising pathway towards continued improvement in computing
speed and energy efficiency without aggressive scaling. However, the memory
wall bottleneck of the traditional von-Neumann architecture persists even at
cryogenic temperature. That is where a compute-in-memory (CiM) architecture,
that embeds computing within the memory unit, comes into play. Computations
within the memory unit help reduce the expensive data transfer between the
memory and the computing units. Therefore, CiM provides extreme energy
efficiency that can enable lower cooling cost at cryogenic temperature. In this
work, we demonstrate CryoCiM, a cryogenic compute-in-memory framework utilizing
a non-volatile memory system based on the quantum anomalous Hall effect (QAHE).
Our design can perform memory read/write, and universal binary logic operations
(NAND, NOR, and XOR). We design a novel peripheral circuit assembly that can
perform the read/write, and single-cycle in-memory logic operations. The
utilization of a QAHE-based memory system promises robustness against process
variations, through the usage of topologically protected resistive states for
data storage. CryoCiM is the first step towards utilizing exclusively cryogenic
phenomena to serve the dual purpose of storage and computation with ultra-low
power (nano-watts) operations.

Emerging Technologies