Emulation of Non-volatile Digital Logic for Batteryless Intermittent Computing

Recent engineering efforts gave rise to the emergence of devices that operate only by harvesting power from ambient energy sources, such as radiofrequency and solar energy. Due to the sporadic ambient energy sources, frequent power failures are inevitable for these devices that rely only on energy harvesting. These devices lose the values maintained in volatile hardware state elements upon a power failure. This situation leads to intermittent execution, which prevents the forward progress of computing operations. To countermeasure power failures, these devices require non-volatile memory elements, e.g., FRAM, to store the computational state. However, hardware designers can only represent volatile state elements using FPGAs in the market and current hardware description languages. As of now, there is no existing solution to fast-prototype non-volatile digital logic. This paper enables FPGA-based emulation of any custom nonvolatile digital logic for intermittent computing. Therefore, our proposal can be a standard part of the current FPGA libraries provided by the vendors to design and validate future non-volatile logic designs targeting intermittent computing.