PIMsynth: A Unified Compiler Framework for Bit-Serial Processing-in-Memory Architectures

Bit-serial processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures have been extensively studied, yet a standardized tool for generating efficient bit-serial code is lacking, hindering fair comparisons. We present a fully automated compiler framework, PIMsynth, for bit-serial PIM architectures, targeting both digital and analog substrates. The compiler takes Verilog as input and generates optimized micro-operation code for programmable bit-serial PIM backends. Our flow integrates logic synthesis, optimization steps, instruction scheduling, and backend code generation into a unified toolchain. With the compiler, we provide a bit-serial compilation benchmark suite designed for efficient bit-serial code generation. To enable correctness and performance validation, we extend an existing PIM simulator to support compiler-generated micro-op-level workloads. Preliminary results demonstrate that the compiler generates competitive bit-serial code within1.08×and1.54×of hand-optimized digital and analog PIM baselines. Our code is publicly available athttps://github.com/UVA-LavaLab/PIMsynth.