Research On Memristor-based Reduced Instruction Set Processor

Most of modern computer adopt the architecture that computation and storage are separated.In such architecture,energy consumption of data movement between processor and memory is far greater than the cost when processor is computing.Meanwhile,performance gap between processors and memories can not be solved in a short time,which will lead to increasingly serious problem of memory wall,thus cause the bottleneck that is hard to break through of performance improvement of modern computers.Memristor is regarded as the fourth circuit element after resistance,capacitance and inductance,it's can be converted reversible between high resistivity and low resistivity under the action of electric pulse.These resistance state can be used to express “0” and “1” logic in digital circuit,and it's information will not lost when power failure,which is different from the traditional electrical-level logic,thus memristors can be used as nonvolatile memory devices.In addition,memristor have the ability to calculate in situ,which means it does not need to read data from memory,and when calculation is completed,data storage are done at the same time,i.e.‘load' and ‘store' operation is not needed.As a result,memristor provides a new direction of solving the problem of memory wall,as well as developing computer architectures that integrating the computation and storage which have lower power consumption and high performance.Research apply the characteristic of memristor that integrating the computation and storage to the design of computer processors,and propose a reduced instruction set processor based on memristors.These new type processors integrate the computation and storage,which are different from modern computer processors that separate computing and storing.The research mainly includes the design of the structure of the processor,the development of the instruction set,the achievement of the instruction set simulator,and test the functionality of simulator.The result shows that,the reduced instruction set processor based on memristors will be superior to the modern compuer architectures that separate computing and storing in both execution speed and parallelism.