Impact of MAC Unit Design Architectures and Their Applications in Modern Computing: An In-Depth Review

Jan 1, 2026 by Sudheer Vishwakarma, Zaheer Khan, Janne J. Lehtomäki (IEEE Access)

DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3664183

We map the MAC unit’s entire evolution from serial and pipelined roots to today’s systolic arrays, tree multipliers, and IMC crossbars, showing why MAC architecture matters across AI, HPC, and DSP. Along the way we highlight clever tradeoffs people actually use—approximate/truncated arithmetic, sparsity bypassing, binary-optimized designs and emerging photonic and adaptive-bit engines—so you can pick the right MAC for your next accelerator.

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