A 3us wake-up time nonvolatile processor based on ferroelectric flip-flops

Nonvolatile processors offer a number of desirable properties including instant on/off, zero standby power and resilience to power failures. This paper presents a fabricated nonvolatile processor based on ferroelectric flip-flops. These flipflops are used in a distributed fashion and are able to maintain system states without any power supply indefinitely. An efficient controller is employed to achieve parallel reads and writes to the flip-flops. A reconfigurable voltage detection system is designed for automatic system backup during power failures. Measurement results show that this nonvolatile processor can operate continuously even under power failures occurring at 20 KHz. It can backup system states within 7μs and restore them within 3 μs. Such capabilities will provide a new level of support to chip-level fine-grained power management and energy harvesting applications.