It has become increasingly challenging to respect Moore's well-known law in recent years. Energy efficiency and manufacturing constraints are among the main challenges to current integrated circuits today. The energy efficiency issue is mainly due to the high leakage current from the CMOS transistors that are used to build almost all logic devices. As a result, performance is limited to a few gigahertz due to high power dissipation. A significant proportion of total power is spent on memory systems due to the increasing trend of embedding volatile memory into systems-on-chip devices. New non-volatile memory technologies are one possible way to solve the energy efficiency issue. Among these technologies, magnetic memory is a promising candidate to replace current memories since it combines non-volatility, high density, low latency and low leakage. This paper describes an approach to obtain large, fine-grained exploration of how magnetic memory can be included in the memory hierarchy of processor-based systems by analyzing both performance and energy consumption.
Over the past few years, a new era of smart connected devices has emerged in the market to enable the future world of the Internet of Things (IoT). A key requirement for IoT applications is the power consumption to allow very high autonomy in the case of battery-powered systems. Depending on the application, such devices will be most of the time in a low-power mode (sleep mode) and will wake up only when there is a task to accomplish (active mode). Emerging non-volatile memory technologies are seen as a very attractive solution to design ultra-low-power systems. Among these technologies, magnetic random access memory is a promising candidate, as it combines non-volatility, high density, reasonable latency, and low leakage. Integration of non-volatility as a new feature of memories has the great potential to allow full data retention after a complete shutdown with a fast wake-up time. This article explores the benefits of having a non-volatile processor to enable ultra-low-power IoT devices.
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