Introduction to Special Issue on In/Near Memory and Storage Computing for Embedded Systems

Abstract

With the rapid advances in manufacturing and communication technologies, embedded systems have evolved tremendously in recent years. However, embedded systems usually have limited energy, computing power, and memory/storage space. In particular, the data transfer cost between CPU and storage/memory becomes the critical challenge for such systems. Nonetheless, in the past decades, memory and storage technologies have been significantly advanced and gradually support the computing capability, and such a development trend of adding computing functions in/near memory or storage devices to enable “memory and storage computing” provides a new opportunity to resolve the performance bottleneck caused by the massive amount of data movement between CPU and memory/storage units. This has been a hot topic and widely acknowledged by academics and industries.

After a rigorous review process, a set of articles were selected for their expertise on the precise topics of each article. Thus, this special issue represents a collective effort from the research community and industry participants on an international scale. From the many excellent submissions received, ten articles are included in this special issue. The articles appearing in this special issue tackle some of the most recent and impactful design issues of in/near memory and storage computing for embedded systems. These articles are briefly discussed in the rest of the introduction.

Publication
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems