Nonvolatile processors: Why is it trending?

Energy harvesting has become a promising solution to power up Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. In this scenario, the constrained power budget and frequent absence of ambient energy cause severe reliability issues and performance degradation on conventional CMOS computing circuits. Fortunately, the advent of nonvolatile processor (NVP) opens the possibility to compute continuously using an intermittent power supply. It is considered as a key component of the next generation IoT edge devices. In this work, we provide insights to the evolution of the NVP and its application in real world scenarios. Efforts on improving the performance of NVP and future research prospects are also discussed in this paper.