Design of an FPGA-based emulator for rapidly prototyping a nonvolatile system-on-a-chip

Abstract This paper presents a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based emulator for rapidly prototyping a non-volatile (NV)-FPGA-based system on chip (SoC) where an FPGA, a central processing unit, and other peripheral modules are integrated into a single chip to address the difficulty in estimating the usefulness of an NV-FPGA-based SoC on a target system. By mimicking the NV-memory device as a sequential logic circuit, a virtual NV-FPGA SoC is implemented on a commercial FPGA board, and its system-level functional verification is performed. As a typical design example, the proposed hardware is implemented on a Digilent Basys 3 board. A fundamental arithmetic logic circuit is implemented on the NV-FPGA, and its logical behavior is the same as that of the original circuit, and NV-logic-specific functions, i.e. store and recall operations are successfully confirmed. Additionally, a 96.3% power reduction is estimated by the NV-FPGA SoC compared to that of a volatile FPGA SoC system under 1.83% of activity ratio.