Nonvolatile Processors: Why Is It Trending?
Fang Su1, Kaisheng Ma2, Xueqing Li2, Tongda Wu1, Yongpan Liu1,a and Vijaykrishnan Narayanan2,b
1Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList).
aypliu@tsinghua.edu.cn
2The Pennsylvania State University.
bvijay@cse.psu.edu
ABSTRACT
Energy harvesting has become a promising solution to power up Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. In this scenario, the constrained power budget and frequent absence of ambient energy cause severe reliability issues and performance degradation on conventional CMOS computing circuits. Fortunately, the advent of nonvolatile processor (NVP) opens the possibility to compute continuously using an intermittent power supply. It is considered as a key component of the next generation IoT edge devices. In this work, we provide insights to the evolution of the NVP and its application in real world scenarios. Efforts on improving the performance of NVP and future research prospects are also discussed in this paper.
Keywords: Internet of Things (IoT), Energy harvesting, Nonvolatile Processor (NVP).
