The landscape of emerging applications has been continually widening, encompassing various data-intensive applications like artificial intelligence, machine learning, secure encryption, Internet-of-Things, etc. A sustainable approach toward creating dedicated hardware platforms that can cater to multiple applications often requires the underlying hardware to context-switch or support more than one context simultaneously. This paper presents a context-switching and dual-context memory based on the standard 8T SRAM bit-cell. Specifically, we exploit the availability of multi-VT transistors by selectively choosing the read-port transistors of the 8T SRAM cell to be either high-VT or low-VT. The 8T SRAM cell is thus augmented to store ROM data (represented as the VT of the transistors constituting the read-port) while simultaneously storing RAM data. Further, we propose specific sensing methodologies such that the memory array can support RAM-only or ROM-only mode (context-switching (CS) mode) or RAM and ROM mode simultaneously (dual-context (DC) mode). Extensive Monte-Carlo simulations have verified the robustness of our proposed ROM-augmented CS/DC memory on the Globalfoundries 22nm-FDX technology node.

翻译：新兴应用的格局持续扩展，涵盖了人工智能、机器学习、安全加密、物联网等多种数据密集型应用。为支持多应用而构建专用硬件平台的可持续方案，通常要求底层硬件具备上下文切换能力，或能同时支持多个上下文。本文提出一种基于标准8T SRAM位单元的上下文切换与双上下文存储器。具体而言，我们利用多阈值电压（multi-VT）晶体管的可用性，选择性地将8T SRAM单元的读端口晶体管设置为高阈值电压（high-VT）或低阈值电压（low-VT）。从而对该8T SRAM单元进行增强，使其在存储RAM数据的同时，能够存储ROM数据（以构成读端口的晶体管VT值表示）。此外，我们提出特定的传感方法，使得存储阵列能够支持仅RAM或仅ROM模式（上下文切换（CS）模式），或同时支持RAM和ROM模式（双上下文（DC）模式）。基于Globalfoundries 22nm-FDX工艺节点的广泛蒙特卡洛模拟验证了所提出的ROM增强型CS/DC存储器的稳健性。