Modern system design using memristors

Abstract

Since memristors have recently come to the forefront of the computer architecture field, the majority of the research is still in its infancy. The most popular application for memristors is memories, namely crossbars, but preliminary work has shown their use in logic circuits too. This work explores two approaches to memristor logic, IMPLY operations and MAD gates. While IMPLY has been successfully demonstrated and popularized in previous works, it suffers from long latencies and destructive operations. MAD gates have been shown to overcome these issues, offering a lower area and lower latency alternative. These two approaches are described, implemented, and analyzed against each other and other proposed approaches to memristor logic. Both methodologies are then presented in the context of a crossbar, showing how IMPLY and MAD operations can be performed on memory cells. It is shown that they offer improved logic-in-memory implementations over alternative proposed works. Lastly, general considerations when designing memristor-based circuits are discussed and future directions of research are motivated.