SimSkip: StrongARM-Comparator Similarity Sensing with SAR-Skipping-Aware Training for Analog Compute-in-Memory
Analog-to-digital conversion dominates the energy and area of analog compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerators. This paper presents SimSkip, a successive-approximation-register (SAR) skipping scheme that combines a lightweight StrongARM-comparator similarity detector with SAR-skipping-aware training. When two held voltages are similar, the upper bits of the preceding code are reused to skip SAR comparisons. Detector-induced disturbance extracted from 55-nm CMOS simulations and bit-exact prefix saturation are embedded in the forward pass, and the network learns to tolerate them through quantization-aware training and knowledge distillation. On an ISAAC-based W4A4 WRN-28-10, SimSkip achieves 77.23% CIFAR-100 top-1 accuracy (mean of three seeds) versus 78.4% for the baseline, while reducing SAR comparisons by 48.2% across three hardware-modeled layers. A first-order model estimates a 27.2% net ADC energy reduction after detector overhead.