CIES Consortium

Industry-Academic Collaboration

Spintronics LSI Technology

R&D of technologies to automatically design environments for low-energy consumption and highly functional VLSI processors based on non-volatile memory

In order to overcome a power-wall problem in 4x-nm CMOS era and beyond, our R&D project aims to develop nonvolatile (NV)- device-based logic-circuit Intellectual Properties (IPs) and its automated design environment. The actual development items are as follows:

1. Development of an automated-design CAD environment for NV-LSIs (cf. Figure right)
   We are engaged in the development of an automated CAD environment for low-power and high-performance NV circuits and systems that integrate emerging back-end memory technologies such as MRAM.
2. Development of a NV-based circuit IPs
   We have also been developing logic-circuit IPs (LUTs, NV registers, etc.) for realizing a further energy-efficient/highly functional NV-LSI.
3. Applications to AI accelerators
   As an effective application, we are developing NV-based energy-efficient AI accelerators.

It is expected that the NV-LSI is utilized in a wide variety of applications such as IoT and mobile devices.