Trends on the Application of Emerging Nonvolatile Memory to Processors and Programmable Device
Abstract
A number of non-volatile memory technologies (NVMs) emerged in the past years. They promise to cope with limitations of standard memory technologies, such as scalability and idle power consumption. Numerous logic circuits based on these emerging technology have been proposed and prototyped in the last years. In this paper, we present an overview and current status of these logic circuits and discuss their potential applications in this field. In the first part, this article provides a survey on the application of those memories to programmable devices. The second section is dedicated to the use of NVMs in the processor's memory hierarchy, where we discuss potential applications based on a preliminary study we performed. Results were obtained using TAS-MRAM NVM technology.
Keywords
microprocessor chips
random-access storage
TAS-MRAM NVM technology
circuit scalability
idle power consumption
logic circuit
processor memory hierarchy
programmable device
CMOS integrated circuits
Computer architecture
Field programmable gate arrays
Microprocessors
Nonvolatile memory
Program processors
Random access memory
Cache Memory
FPGA
FeRAM
MRAM
Memory-in-logic
NVM
PCM
RRAM