Exploiting Non-Leading Zeroes to Reduce Energy Consumption for Non-Volatile Memories

The penalty of write operations is one of the main hindrances for adopting nonvolatile memory for IoT devices. As a solution for mitigating this problem, the read-before-write scheme is proposed to prevent unnecessary writing by comparing all bits to be written with the existing values. However, this approach also generates additional read accesses for every write access. To reduce these read operations, we design a zero-bit pattern scheme that deactivates bit cells indicated as zero bits during access to the cache. In our experiments, the dynamic energy consumption is decreased by 35.0% with 2.3% additional storage. (c) 2021 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.