A 462GOPs/J RRAM-based nonvolatile intelligent processor for energy harvesting IoE system featuring nonvolatile logics and processing-in-memory

An energy-efficient nonvolatile intelligent processor (NIP) is proposed for battery-less energy harvesting system. This NIP employs RRAM-based nonvolatile logics (NVL) with self-write-termination (SWT) scheme and low-power processing-in-memory (PIM) to achieve energy-efficient computing against frequent power-off situations. An NIP test chip was fabricated in 150nm CMOS process using HfO RRAM. This NIP chip achieves 462GOPs/J energy efficiency at 20MHz clock frequency, showing 13× performance improvement over state-of-the-arts. This work presents the first nonvolatile processor capable of general as well as neural network computing in addition to the first integrated chip using RRAM-based PIM.