Cross-point Circuits for Computation, Interconnects, Security and Storage

Interconnect fabric;Content addressable memory;In-memory compute;Hardware security;Flash memory;Ferroelectric RAM;Electrical Engineering;Engineering;Electrical Engineering

Jeloka, SupreetSylvester, Dennis Michael ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Interconnect fabric;    Content addressable memory;    In-memory compute;    Hardware security;    Flash memory;    Ferroelectric RAM;    Electrical Engineering;    Engineering;    Electrical Engineering;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/137048/sjeloka_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Limited supply-voltage scaling in newer semiconductor technology nodes, has led to an increase in power-density and stagnation of the clock frequency of microprocessors. To overcome this challenge, the trend for performance intensive parts has been to replace the power-hungry, high-speed cores with a number of power-efficient simpler cores, to form a many-core system.For many-core systems the major challenge is the need to share data and hand-shaking signals between the cores working in parallel. On the other hand, battery operated mobile systems have a much lower power budget but still need higher performance during active mode. For mobile systems, despite the use of aggressive voltage-frequency scaling techniques for energy efficiency, the conventional architecture still requires a large amount of energy for data movement between the core and the memory as compared to the actual computation. Finally, on the lowest end of the energy spectrum are systems for Internet-of-Things (IoT), which mainly consist of sensor nodes that intermittently wake-up and log sensed data. Reducing data logging energy is a major challenge for IoT systems. This dissertation presents cross-point circuit-based solutions for improved energy-efficiency for each of the three design types - many-core systems, mobile systems and IoT systems. Cross-point circuits are array based circuits composed of small unit blocks. These unit blocks can be easily optimized for both area and energy, and then tiled together to form large scalable circuits. First, this dissertation presents a cross-point based interconnect, Hi-Rise, which is a low latency, area-energy efficient 3D switch for efficient communication between large number of cores, in amany-core system. Second, it presents a configurable SRAM circuit, with capabilities to perform search (content-addressable-memory) and logical functions within the memory using standard SRAM bit-cells to reduce the data movement. It also can be repurposed as a Physically-Unclonable-Function (PUF) for hardware authentication. Finally, this dissertation presents circuit design for two non-volatile memory solutions optimized for ultra-low energy data logging in IoT systems.The proposed flash memory design has an ultra-wide 1Kb/program cycle, enabled by charge sharing and charge recycling, whereas the adiabatic Ferroelectric-RAM uses a resonating sine wave for low-energy memory access.