Spintronic Normally-off Heterogeneous System-on-Chip Design

One of the major challenges in device down-scaling is the increase in the leakage power, which becomes a major component in the overall system power consumption. One way to deal with this problem is to introduce the concept of normally off instant-on computing architectures, in which the system components are powered (AT when they are not active. An associated challenge is the back-up and restoration of system states, which in turn can introduce additional costs that erode some of the gains. A promising alternative is the use of nonvolatile storage elements in the System-on-Chip (SoC) design which can instantly power-down and retain their values. In this work, we show how we can design a normally-off SoC by exploiting non-volatile latches, flip-flops and registers. The idea is to design a hybrid architecture containing conventional CMOS bistables as well as different flavors of spintronic-based non-volatile storage elements, to balance performance, area, and energy efficiency.