Reconfigurable circuits using magnetic tunneling junction memories

Abstract

This paper presents the first results of our work to research and develop new reconfigurable circuits and topologies based on Magnetic RAM (MRAM) memory elements. This work proposes a coarse-grained reconfigurable array using MRAM. A coarse-grained array, where each reconfigurable element computes on 4-bit or larger input words, is more suitable to execute data-oriented algorithms and is more able to exploit large amounts of operation-level parallelism than common fine-grained architectures. The architecture is organized as a one-dimensional array of programmable ALU and the configuration bits are stored in MRAM. MRAM provide non-volatility with cell areas and with access speeds comparable to those of SRAM and with lower process complexity than FLASH memory. MRAM can also be efficiently organized as multi-context memories. © 2010 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.