NORM: An FPGA-based Non-volatile Memory Emulation Framework for Intermittent Computing

Today’s intermittent devices operate by relying only on harvested energy accumulated in their tiny energy reservoirs, typically capacitors. An intermittent device dies due to a power failure when there is no energy in its capacitor and boots again when the harvested energy is sufficient to power its hardware components. Power failures lead to the loss of computation state and intermediate results. Therefore, computation might not progress and produce useful results. Intermittent computing systems with a built-in fast non-volatile memory in their micro-architecture ensure the forward progress of computation automatically. However, the lack of design tools makes fast prototyping these systems difficult. Even though FPGAs are common platforms for fast prototyping and behavioral verification of processor architectures, they do not target nonvolatile processors. This article proposes a new FPGA-based framework, named NORM (Non-volatile memORy eMulator), to emulate and verify the behavior of any intermittent computing system that exploits fast non-volatile memories. NORM enables fast-prototyping and validating transiently-powered hardware architectures.