NCFET based, Non-Volatile and Radiation-Hardened Flip Flop with Simultaneous Backup Capability for Non-volatile/ Normally-Off Computing

Abstract

Nonvolatile computing have been shown to be effective in the face of the sudden power outage for wireless sensor networks, Internet-of-Things applications, data converters, and emerging energy-harvesting circuits. It also plays a significant role in power-gating to minimize the leakage power for improving the energy efficiency. However, using on-chip backup module for D flip–flop has a bottleneck, and result in an increase in total power consumption, occupied area, and reduced calculation speed. Furthermore, the backup module needs external control signals, which increases the complexity of the circuit. This paper proposes a novel nonvolatile flip-flop with simultaneous data backup capability, which uses NCFET ferroelectric transistor to fundamentally advance the non-volatile computing paradigm. Proposed NVFF exhibits 0.8% faster and 5.0% smaller energy than previous works, while uniquely providing Radiation-Hardened feature.

Keywords

• data backup
• ferroelectric transistor
• hysteresis
• non-volatility
• non-volatile flip-flop
• data restore.