Energy-Harvesting Systems for Green Computing

Energy harvesting technologies provide a promising alternative to battery-powered systems and create an opportunity to achieve sustainable computing for the exploitation of ambient energy sources. However, energy harvesting devices and power generators encompass a number of non-classical system behaviors or characteristics, such as delivering nondeterministic power density, and these would create hindrance for effectively utilizing the harvested energy. Previously, we have investigated new design methods and tools that are used to enable power adaptive computing and, particularly, catering non-deterministic voltage, which can efficiently utilize ambient energy sources. Also, we developed a co-optimization approach to maximize the computational efficiency from the harvested ambient energy. This paper will provide a review of these methods. Emerging technologies, such as 3D-IC, which would also enable new paradigm of green and high-performance computing, will be also discussed.

Zero-static-power nonvolatile logic-in-memory circuits for flexible electronics

Flexible logic circuits and memory with ultra-low static power consumption are in great demand for battery-powered flexible electronic systems. Here, we show that a flexible nonvolatile logic-in-memory circuit enabling normally-off computing can be implemented using a poly（1,3,5-trivinyl-l,3,5-trimethyl cyclotrisiloxane） （pV3D3）-based memristor array. Although memristive logic-in-memory circuits have been previously reported, the requirements of additional components and the large variation of memristors have limited demonstrations to simple gates within a few operation cycles on rigid substrates only. Using memristor-aided logic （MAGIC） architecture requiring only memristors and pV3D3-memristor with good uniformity on a flexible substrate, for the first time, we experimentally demonstrated our implementation of MAGIC-NOT and -NOR gates during multiple cycles and even under bent conditions. Other functions, such as OR, AND, NAND, and a half adder, are also realized by combinations of NOT and NOR gates within a crossbar array. This research advances the development of novel computing architecture with zero static power consumption for battery- powered flexible electronic systems.

Accurate Reliability Analysis Methods for Approximate Computing Circuits

In recent years,Approximate Computing Circuits(ACCs)have been widely used in applications with intrinsic tolerance to errors.With the increased availability of approximate computing circuit approaches,reliability analysis methods for assessing their fault vulnerability have become highly necessary.In this study,two accurate reliability evaluation methods for approximate computing circuits are proposed.The reliability of approximate computing circuits is calculated on the basis of the iterative Probabilistic Transfer Matrix(PTM)model.During the calculation,the correlation coefficients are derived and combined to deal with the correlation problem caused by fanout reconvergence.The accuracy and scalability of the two methods are verified using three sets of approximate computing circuit instances and more circuits in Evo Approx8 b,which is an approximate computing circuit open source library.Experimental results show that relative to the Monte Carlo simulation,the two methods achieve average error rates of 0.46%and 1.29%and time overheads of 0.002%and 0.1%.Different from the existing approaches to reliability estimation for approximate computing circuits based on the original PTM model,the proposed methods reduce the space overheads by nearly 50%and achieve time overheads of 1.78%and 2.19%.