Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

There are great demands on high-performance and low-power VLSI processors for the advanced information society. However, standby power consumption due to leakage current as well as communication bottleneck between memory and logic module are the critical issues in the nanometer-scale VLSI processor. Our solution for the problem is to realize a brain-like reconfigurable VLSI processor by the combination of transistors and nonvolatile devices. Since all the data is stored in the nonvolatile devices, power supply of unused blocks are easily cut off, which greatly reduces standby power consumption. The combination of transistors and nonvolatile devices also makes it possible to merge logic and storage functions into the same circuit. Moreover, by utilizing nonvolatile devices, several numbers of logic functions are stored with no power overhead and they are immediately changed. Now, we are working on developing key components for the brain-like processor and exploring applications of the brain-like processor.