The demand for high-performance computing and rapidly increasing power consumption has increased the necessity for application-specific accelerators. In the datacenter and mobile system, more applications are increasingly relying on accelerators. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) emerge as a good candidate because they have high programmability and power efficiency. As the number of applications requiring acceleration increases, there is huge demand for FPGAs that support multiple contexts. Previous FPGA designs that support multicontext have various shortcomings such as volatility, poor power efficiency, large performance, area, and reconfiguration overhead. In this article, we propose a spin-transfer torque magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM)-based nonvolatile multicontext FPGA (NVMC-FPGA) that overcomes these shortcomings. We introduce the NVMC-FPGA architecture and operation modes that take advantage of nonvolatility and support multicontext. We also develop the multicontext-aware FPGA computer aided design flow to make the most of the NVMC-FPGA. Compared to the conventional SRAM-based FPGA, when eight identical circuits are mapped, the NVMC-FPGA improves the performance by 15.3% on average and reduces the power consumption by 11.2%–80.7%, depending on the number of simultaneously activated circuits. Moreover, when eight different circuits are mapped, the NVMC-FPGA improves the performance by 58.5% on average and reduces the power consumption by 6.2%–63.3%, depending on the number of simultaneously activated circuits.

Internet routers/switches are vulnerable to system failures which require a power reset. Tremendous efforts are made to guarantee the high availability of the systems. A recent work shows that a phase change memory (PCM)-based routing lookup table can achieve high availability in the destination lookup of routers/switches. However, a packet buffer in routers/switches cannot benefit from the lookup table approach because it requires a much larger and higher-bandwidth memory system and its memory traffic is equally divided into reads and writes, while routing table accesses are mostly read-dominant. PCM can provide high availability even when the system undergoes a power reset but exhibits unacceptable write bandwidth. In this work, we propose a magnetic RAM (MRAM)/PCM-based hybrid memory packet buffer and a packet mapping method. A small MRAM combined with a large PCM can outperform the dynamic random access memory (DRAM)-based packet buffer by 28.5% or 22.4% on average for internet-mix packet traffic when optimizing only bandwidth or both bandwidth and lifetime. The proposed adaptive packet mapping method maps small packets less than a predetermined packet size threshold to MRAM for maximizing PCM bandwidth as small packets degrade row buffer locality in PCM. In addition, the mapping method dynamically changes the packet size threshold to capture the working set of packet buffering, which significantly improves PCM lifetime.