Mementos: System Support for Long-Running Computation on RFID-Scale Devices

web.cs.umass.edu

24 points·frappe06··2 comments

Texas Instruments has also done interesting work in this area with "Compute Through Power Loss" where they use the non volatile FRAM in some MSP430s as working memory [1]

I don't think it needs the kind of compiler tricks this article describes though, instead it's just different hardware. I would be quite interested in seeing a benchmark of the technique in this paper (fast computation in SRAM and cleverly timed checkpoints to Flash) vs just running the stack in FRAM to start with, especially on this MSP430 that has both all 3 memory typed and can work as an RFID tag [2]

[1] https://www.ti.com/tool/TIDM-FRAM-CTPL

[2] https://www.ti.com/product/RF430FRL152H

Intermittent computing has been interesting for a while to me. I've been thinking of how some technologies used today have implemented the technique of harvesting small amounts of energy to perform some operations required for a given task.

See for instance iLOQ, they provide locks/keys that are authenticated through harvesting energy from a user simply inserting the key, and in that time authenticates if the user is the owner of the lock [1].

I wonder where there are more products like these...

[1] https://www.iloq.com/en/

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