Maximizing Forward Progress with Cache-aware Backup for Self-powered Non-volatile Processors

Jing Li, Mengying Zhao, Lei Ju, Chun Jason Xue, Zhiping Jia

Abstract: Energy harvesting is replacing battery to power embedded systems such as Internet of Things and wearable devices. Unstable energy supply brings challenges to energy harvesting powered system, resulting in frequent interruptions. Non-volatile processor is proposed to back up volatile logics before energy depletion and recover the system status after energy resumes. The backup efficiency of memory content significantly affects program performance. There are existing researches focusing on backup optimizations, but they did not fully consider cache behaviors. In this paper, we introduce cache persistence analysis into memory backup for self-powered non-volatile processors. The evaluation shows that the proposed cache-aware backup delivers on average 45.6% improvement in forward progress, achieving 40.2% and 12.7% higher system performance compared with instant and cache-unaware backup.