Investigating the Impact of Non-Volatile Memories on Energy-Efficiency of Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures

Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) are promising solutions to achieve more performance with the end of Moore's law. CGRAs can provide flexibility as well as near-ASIC energy efficiency. Since the advent of IoT and battery-powered edge devices, energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important. Memory accesses contribute to about 50% of overall energy consumption of the CGRAs. Interesting features of emerging non-volatile memories (eNVMs) like low power consumption and high density have grown the attentions. In this work, the effect of eNVMs on energy efficiency of CGRAs have been investigated. The analysis using Polybench benchmark suite shows that STT-MRAM and PCM can result in a 94% and 85% reduction of energy consumption of memory accesses respectively compared to SRAM. Moreover, total access latency can also be improved by 60% and 49% in STT-MRAM and PCM.