Prototyping memristors in digital system with an FPGA-based testing environment

Toward integrating memristors in CMOS-based designs flexible prototyping environments are necessary. However, research in digital memristive systems so far lacks an adequate testing platform for real world devices. To achieve better handson experience, we developed a flexible FPGA-based solution which allows to link memristors with arbitrary compute units such as MIPS, ARM processor cores or own custom designs. The testing environment is comprised of two main components: a dedicated hardware interface circuit for steering discrete memristor devices and a memory controller as IP core establishing the communication with the hardware interface utilizing an easy-to-use AXI interface. Furthermore, in order to integrate the prototyping platform in processing systems a C API is supplied. This testing environment lays the foundation for integrating memristors in future hybrid CMOS-based SoCs. The platform is put into practice for evaluating a ternary processor on physical hardware using memristors as multi-level storage cells.