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

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 automatic design environment. The actual development items are as follows:

1. Development of a CAD environment for NV-FPGAs
   FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Array) is a attractive hardware platform for various applications. We have been establishing the environment by combining an open-source CAD tool, called Verilog-to-Routing (VTR), with nonvolatile logic-circuit IPs.
2. Development of a NV-based circuit IPs
   We have also been developing logic circuit IPs for realizing a further energy-efficient/highly functional NV-FPGA.
3. Applications to AI accelerators
   As an effective application, we have been developing NV-FPGA-based energy-efficient AI accelerator.

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