A Non-volatile, Low-Power, and Fast NCFET-based Flip-Flop with Simultaneous Backup Capability for Non-volatile Computing

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of Computer Engineering, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman (SBUK), Kerman, Iran

Abstract

In computing circuits, the unexpected interruption of the voltage source causes the loss of data and redoing the calculations, which reduces the speed of calculations and increases the power consumption. Consequently, today, the design of computing circuits using non-volatile elements has received much attention. In these circuits, it is easier and less expensive to implement the power-gating technique, which plays an important role in reducing leakage power. In the non-volatile circuits that have been proposed so far, a separate back-up module is used, which saves the state of the D-flip-flops on the chip at specific time intervals. However, the use of a separate backup module ultimately leads to an increase in the total power consumption, the occupied area, and a decrease in the calculation speed. In addition, the backup module requires external control signals, which increases the complexity of the system. To solve these problems, in this paper, a new non-volatile flip-flop with simultaneous data backup capability is proposed, which uses NCFET ferroelectric transistor to fundamentally advance the non-volatile computing paradigm. The proposed flip-flop for backup and recovery operation has energy at fJ level and delay at ps level.

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References

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