CIMFlow accepted by DAC 2025: an integrated framework for systematic digital CIM design and evaluation

👏 Paper title: CIMFlow: An Integrated Framework for Systematic Design and Evaluation of Digital CIM Architectures.

CIMFlow is an integrated framework for systematic design and evaluation of digital compute-in-memory architectures. CIM research often requires coordination between software workloads, architecture definitions, compilation, and simulation, but these pieces are frequently developed in isolation.

CIMFlow provides a full-stack infrastructure that includes an instruction set architecture, an MLIR-based compiler, and a SystemC-based simulator. Its modular design supports flexible architectural exploration and helps researchers rapidly prototype, validate, and compare digital CIM concepts on DNN workloads.

The framework reduces the friction of evaluating CIM ideas because it links the software stack and architecture model in one flow. Researchers can express workloads, compile them toward CIM execution, and analyze performance with a simulator that reflects architectural choices.

This makes CIMFlow useful not only as a tool but also as a common methodology for comparing digital CIM designs. It helps move CIM research from isolated prototypes toward reproducible system-level exploration.

“Yingjie Qi presented the CIMFlow work at the DAC 2025 conference in San Francisco.”