Early Design Space Exploration Framework for Memristive Crossbar Arrays

For memristive crossbar arrays, currently, no high-level design validation and early space exploration tools exist in the literature. Such tools are essential to quickly verify the design functionality as well as compare design alternatives in terms of power and performance. In this work, we propose a VHDL-based framework that enables us to quickly perform behavioral simulation as well as estimate dynamic energy consumption and speed of any large memristive crossbar array. We propose a high-level (VHDL) model of a memristor based on which crossbar architectures can be modeled. The individual memristor model is embedded with power and delay numbers obtained from a detailed memristor model. We demonstrate the framework for MAGIC-style memristive crossbars. We validate the framework against detailed Verilog-A based model on fifteen combinational benchmarks. For the single row model, we obtained 153x simulation speedup over HSPICE, average estimation errors of 6.64% and 0% for dynamic energy consumption and cycle-time, respectively. For the transpose model, we obtained average estimation errors of 5.51% and 10.90% for dynamic energy consumption and cycle-time, respectively. We also extend our framework to support another prominent logic style and validate through a case study. The proposed framework can be easily extended to other emerging technologies.

Public-Private Partnership for the Development of Space Sector in the United States and Great Britain

The article provides an analysis of modern trends in building public-private partnership (PPP), gives an overview of key studies devoted to this subject in general and PPPs in the field of space activities in particular. The authors analyze the practice of public-private partnerships in the U. S. and Great Britain on the examples of specific mechanisms, their key features, advantages and disadvantages that determine the possibility of their application in different areas of government-business cooperation in the field of space exploration. In order to find possible ways for direct application or adaptation of this experience in Russia for organizing space exploration PPPs the researchers concluded that the level of high-tech production in this country is insufficient and significant administrative barriers for attracting private sector into the space industry are still present.