Emerging Non-Volatile Memory technologies for future low power reconfigurable systems

Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technologies are promising alternatives to traditional CMOS memory technologies. While NVMs were primarily studied to be used in the memory hierarchy, they can also provide benefits in reconfigurable systems such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). In this paper, we investigate the applicability of different NVM technologies for the configuration bits of FPGAs and propose a power-efficient reconfigurable architecture based on Phase Change Memory (PCM). Quantitative analysis for various FPGA architectures using different memory technologies shows the benefits of the proposed scheme.