Area and performance co-optimization for domain wall memory in application-specific embedded systems

Abstract

Domain Wall Memory (DWM), a recently developed spin-based non-volatile memory technology, inherently offers unprecedented benefits in density by storing multiple bits in the domains of a ferromagnetic nanowire, which logically resembles a bit-serial tape. However, this structure also leads to a unique challenge that the bits must be sequentially accessed by performing \shift operations, resulting in variable and potential higher access latencies. In this paper, we propose a hardware and software co-optimize approach to improve area efficiency and performance for DWM in application-specific embedded systems. For an application-specific embedded system, this technique can obtain a DWM which consists of both micro-cell DWM and macro-cell DWM with minimal area size. Meanwhile, instruction schedule and data allocation with minimal memory access overhead are generated. Experimental results show that the proposed method can minimize the DWM area size while satisfying a system performance constraint.