Trends on the application of emerging nonvolatile memory to processors and programmable devices

A number of non-volatile memory technologies (NVMs) emerged in the past years. They promise to cope with limitations of standard memory technologies, such as scalability and idle power consumption. Numerous logic circuits based on these emerging technology have been proposed and prototyped in the last years. In this paper, we present an overview and current status of these logic circuits and discuss their potential applications in this field. In the first part, this article provides a survey on the application of those memories to programmable devices. The second section is dedicated to the use of NVMs in the processor's memory hierarchy, where we discuss potential applications based on a preliminary study we performed. Results were obtained using TAS-MRAM NVM technology.