A Nonvolatile Register with a Differential Information Storing Scheme

Reduction in power consumption and area with conventional level of short operating time

Overview

Intermittent computing enables continuous processing under unstable energy supply. In edge device implementation, a nonvolatile logic circuit using nonvolatile registers is promising as it retains internal state with only local data transfers.　
Conventional nonvolatile registers, composed of multiple 1-bit memory circuits (NV-FFs), require two MTJ devices per bit, leading to high area and energy overhead. The reference-load sharing scheme (RLSS) was proposed to solve this issue, however, a new issue arose as the required operation time increased in proportion to the number of register bits.
This invention introduces a differential information storage scheme (DISS), which stores 1-bit data via resistance differences between adjacent MTJ devices. This allows two-cycle backup and restore, reducing energy and area while maintaining conventional operation speed, as confirmed by simulations.

Backup and Restore Operation and Performance Comparison

Product Application

・Nonvolatile registers and nonvolatile flip-flops
・Intermittent Computing and Energy Harvesting
・Reduction in power consumption of existing desktop and supercomputers

Related Works

[1] DOI: 10.1109/MWSCAS60917.2024.10658712

IP Data

IP No.　 ： JP2024-230132　
Inventor ： NATSUI Masanori, YOSHIDA Tomoo, HANYU Takahiro
keyword ： Nonvolatile registers, Nonvolatile flip-flops, Intermittent computing, Energy harvesting, Reduction in power consumption