# Systolic Array-based Accelerator for Structured State-Space Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21394 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21394/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Core SSM architectures for language, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 24 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Core SSM architectures for language](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/core-ssm-architectures-for-language/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Simplified State Space Layers for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04933/) (2022)
- [Long Range Arena: A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04006/) (2020)
- [In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04760/) (2017)
- [Combining Recurrent, Convolutional, and Continuous-time Models with Linear State-Space Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13985/) (2021)
- [HiPPO: Recurrent Memory with Optimal Polynomial Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07669/) (2020)
- [Hungry Hungry Hippos: Towards Language Modeling with State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14052/) (2022)
- [Diagonal State Spaces are as Effective as Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14343/) (2022)
- [Long Range Language Modeling via Gated State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13947/) (2022)
- [Gate-Variants of Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05923/) (2017)
- [The Illusion of State in State-Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08819/) (2024)
- [Dual-path RNN: efficient long sequence modeling for time-domain single-channel speech separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06379/) (2019)
- [Liquid Time-constant Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04439/) (2020)
- [Sequence to Sequence -- Video to Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00487/) (2015)
- [Liquid Structural State-Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12951/) (2022)
- [Mamba-ND: Selective State Space Modeling for Multi-Dimensional Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05892/) (2024)
- [Mamba-360: Survey of State Space Models as Transformer Alternative for Long Sequence Modelling: Methods, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16112/) (2024)
- [State-space Models with Layer-wise Nonlinearity are Universal Approximators with Exponential Decaying Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13414/) (2023)
- [MARCA: Mamba Accelerator with ReConfigurable Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11440/) (2024)
- [tcFFT: Accelerating Half-Precision FFT through Tensor Cores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11471/) (2021)
- [FEATHER: A Reconfigurable Accelerator with Data Reordering Support for Low-Cost On-Chip Dataflow Switching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13170/) (2024)
- [FastMamba: A High-Speed and Efficient Mamba Accelerator on FPGA with Accurate Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18975/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sequence modeling is crucial for AI to understand temporal data and detect complex time-dependent patterns. While recurrent neural networks (RNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and Transformers have advanced in capturing long-range dependencies, they struggle with achieving high accuracy with very long sequences due to limited memory retention (fixed context window). State-Space Models (SSMs) leverage exponentially decaying memory enabling lengthy context window and so they process very long data sequences more efficiently than recurrent and Transformer-based models. Unlike traditional neural models like CNNs and RNNs, SSM-based models require solving differential equations through continuous integration, making training and inference both compute- and memory-intensive on conventional CPUs and GPUs. In this paper we introduce a specialized hardware accelerator, EpochCore, for accelerating SSMs. EpochCore is based on systolic arrays (SAs) and is designed to enhance the energy efficiency and throughput of inference of SSM-based models for long-range sequence tasks. Within the SA, we propose a versatile processing element (PE) called LIMA-PE to perform traditional and specialized MAC operations to support traditional DNNs and SSMs. To complement the EpochCore microarchitecture, we propose a novel dataflow, ProDF, which enables highly efficient execution of SSM-based models. By leveraging the LIMA-PE microarchitecture and ProDF, EpochCore achieves on average 2000x improvement in performance on LRA datasets compared to a GPU and 250x gains in performance and 45x improvement in energy efficiency, over traditional SA-based accelerators (TPU).