doi:10.1155/2008/723950 Research Article On the Use ofMagnetic RAMs in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

This paper describes the integration of field-induced magnetic switching (FIMS) and thermally assisted switching (TAS) magnetic random access memories in FPGA design. The nonvolatility of the latter is achieved through the use of magnetic tunneling junctions (MTJs) in the MRAM cell. A thermally assisted switching scheme helps to reduce power consumption during write operation in comparison to the writing scheme in the FIMS-MTJ device. Moreover, the nonvolatility of such a design based on either an FIMS or a TAS writing scheme should reduce both power consumption and configuration time required at each power up of the circuit in comparison to classical SRAM-based FPGAs. A real-time reconfigurable (RTR) micro-FPGA using FIMS-MRAM or TAS-MRAM allows dynamic reconfiguration mechanisms, while featuring simple design architecture. Copyright © 2008 Y. Guillemenet et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1