Non-Volatile Logic SoC with Software-Hardware Co-design and Integrated Supply Supervisor for Energy Harvesting Applications

摘要

In a world where electronics is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, the challenge of powering devices is progressively becoming more difficult. Often it is impractical to replace batteries or line power numerous devices. Energy harvesting is an attractive alternative but has the inherent disadvantage of frequent power loss. For processing systems like microcontrollers (MCUs) power restoration usually requires a boot up sequence before the target application can start. Boot up negatively impacts the power budget and response time of a MCU. This paper describes how non-volatile memory can be used in an efficient manner to preserve the system state of a MCU. As a result, an application can continue operating from where it left off before the power loss, enabling compute through power loss. In contrast to previously published work, this work is a fully integrated SoC that automatically responds to an impending power loss. The MCU features an integrated supply supervisor with fail safe operation. A novel software synchronized state back-up process is also introduced, which drastically reduces the number of flops that need to be saved.