Design of a highly reliable nonvolatile flip-flop incorporating a common-mode write error detection capability

Abstract

Nonvolatile flip-flop (NVFF) is an important component for implementing an energy-efficient logic large-scale integration (LSI) circuit that utilizes nonvolatile memory (NVM) function of magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) devices. NVFF must be highly reliable in data store and restore operations for nonvolatile power gating. This study proposes an NVFF that can detect arbitrary errors occurring when storing data to the embedded NVM caused by the stochastic behavior of MTJ devices. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed NVFF can detect arbitrary error conditions, including the unsupported condition in the previously proposed reliable NVFF, while maintaining comparable performance to a conventional condition in normal flip-flop operations.

A Reliability-Enhanced Differential Sensing Amplifier for Hybrid CMOS/MTJ Logic Circuits

“…Depending on the relative magnetization orientation of these two FM layers, i.e., parallel (P) or anti-parallel (AP), each MTJ device can exhibit two stable resistance states, i.e., R P or R AP , which are used to represent binary logic information '0 and '1 , respectively, as shown in Figure 1b. Using the MTJs as the non-volatile storage elements, several non-volatile logic circuits, such as magnetic flip-flop [7][8][9], magnetic look-up table [10][11][12], magnetic full-adder [13][14][15] and ternary content-addressable memory [16][17][18], have been proposed.…”