Energy-Efficient and Highly-Reliable Nonvolatile FPGA Using Self-Terminated Power-Gating Scheme

An energy-efficient and highly-reliable nonvolatile FPGA using a self-terminated power-gating scheme is proposed. Since the write current is automatically cut off just after the temporal data in the flip-flop is successfully backed up in the nonvolatile device, the amount of write energy can be minimized with no write failure. Moreover, when the backup operation in a particular logic cluster is completed, power supply of the cluster is immediately turned off, which minimizes standby energy due to leakage current. In fact, the total amount of energy consumption during the backup operation is reduced by 64% in comparison with that of a conventional worst-case based approach where the long time write current pulse is used for the reliable write.