ReRAM-based processing-in-memory architecture for blockchain platforms

Abstract

Blockchain's decentralized and consensus mechanism has attracted lots of applications, such as IoT devices. Blockchain maintains a linked list of blocks and grows by mining new blocks. However, the Blockchain mining consumes huge computation resource and energy, which is unacceptable for resource-limited embedded devices. This paper for the first time presents a ReRAM-based processing-in-memory architecture for Blockchain mining, called Re-Mining. Re-Mining includes a message schedule module and a SHA computation module. The modules are composed of several basic ReRAM-based logic operations units, such as ROR, RSF and XOR. Re-Mining further designs intra-transaction and inter-transaction parallel mechanisms to accelerate the Blockchain mining. Simulation results show that the proposed Re-Mining architecture outperforms CPU-based and GPU-based implementations significantly.