에너지 소비 및 메모리 내구성을 고려한 EEPROM-SRAM 하이브리드 비휘발성 카운터의 설계 공간 탐색

Abstract

Non-volatile counter is a counter that maintains the value without external power supply. It has been used for the applications related to warranty issues to count and record certain events such as power cycles, operating time, hard resets, and timeouts. It has been conventionally implemented with volatile memory-based counter and battery backup or non-volatile memory such as EEPROM. Both of them have a lifetime issue due to the limited lifetime of the battery and the endurance of the non-volatile memory cells, which incurs significant redundancy in design. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid architecture of volatile (SRAM) and non-volatile memory (EEPROM) cells to achieve required lifetime of the non-volatile counter with smaller cost. We conduct a design space exploration of the proposed hybrid architecture with the parameters of various kinds of non-volatile memories. The analysis result shows that the proposed hybrid non-volatile counter can extend the lifetime up to 6 times compared to the battery-backup volatile memory-based implementation.