In recent years, emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, e.g., Phase-Change RAM (PCRAM), STT-RAM (MRAM) Resistive RAM (RRAM), and Memristors, have gained substantial attentions and are being actively pursued by industry. With combined attractive features such as scalability, fast read/write, negligibel leakage, and non-volatility, these emerging memory technologies demonstrated a great potential to be the candidates of the future universal memories.
As such emerging memory
technologies are getting mature, it is important for circuit/architecture
designers to understand their pros and cons for better utilizing them to
improve the performance/power/reliability of future computing systems.
This project seeks to answer the questions as follows:
How to model such emerging memory technologies at circuit/architecture
levels?
What will be the impacts of such memory technologies on the future
computer system designs?
What are the research challenges to overcome for the widely-adoption of
these technologies?
What will be the novel applications/architectures that can leverage such
emerging memory technologies?
This tutorial paper gives an overview of the motivation of this project. Yuan Xie. "Modeling, Architecture, and Applications for Emerging Non-volatile Memory Technologies." IEEE Computer
Design and Test, Vol.28, No.1, pp.44-51, January 2011
Tool Release:
- PCRAMsim: It is a tool for estimating the optimum access times, and power dissipation of a PCRAM-based memory. (Beta version with technical details are published in ICCAD 2009)
- NVsim (Beta Release): NVsim is a suite of toolsets for modeling cache/memory/storage that are based on the emerging non-volatile memory technologies.
Selected Publications:
- [TCAD2012] Xiangyu Dong, Cong Xu, Yuan Xie, Norm Jouppi. "NVSim: A Circuit-Level Performance, Energy, and Area Model for Emerging Non-Volatile Memory", To Appear in IEEE Transactions on Computer Aids Design (TCAD), 2012. You may download the NVSim toolset from here
- [TACO11] Xiangyu Dong, Yuan Xie, Naveen Muralimanohar, Norm Jouppi. "Hybrid Checkpointing using Emerging Non-Volatile Memories for Future Exascale Systems." ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), Vol.8, No. 2, Article 5, 29 pages, July 2011
- [IETCDT2011] Xiangyu Dong, Xiaoxia Wu, Yuan Xie, Yiran Chen, Hai Li. "Stacking MRAM atop Microprocessors: An Architecture- Level Evaluation." IET Computers and Digital Techniques (IET CDT), Vo.5, No.3, pp.213-220, June 2011
- [ICCAD2011] Cong Xu, Dimin Niu, Xiaochun Zhu, Seung H. Kang, Matt Nowak and Yuan Xie, "Device-Architecture Co-Optimization of STT-RAM Based Memory for Low Power Embedded System", Proceedings of ACM/IEEE Intl. Conf. on Computer-aided Design (ICCAD), 2011, pp.463-470.
- [ISLPED10] Yibo Chen, Jishen Zhao, Yuan Xie, "3D-NonFAR: Three-dimensional Non-Volatile FPGA Architecture Using Phase Change Memory", Intl Symp. on Low Power Electronics Devices (ISLPED), 2010.
- [TACO] Xiaoxia Wu, Jian Li, Lixi Zhang, E. Speight, R. Rajamony, Yuan Xie. "Hybrid Cache Architecture with Disparate Memory Technologies." To appear in ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO).
- [DAC 10] Dimin Niu, Yiran Chen, Cong Xu, Yuan Xie, "Impact of Process Variations on Emerging Memristor." To appear in Proceedings of Design Automation Conference (DAC). 2010.
- [DATE 10] Yongsoo Joo, Dimin Niu, Guangyu Sun, Xiangyu Dong, Yuan Xie, "Energy- and Endurance-Aware Design of Phase Change Memory Caches." Proceedings of Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE). 2010.
- [HPCA 10] Guangyu Sun, Yongsoo Joo, Yibo Chen, Yuan Xie, Yiran Chen, Helen Li, "A Hybrid Solid-State Storage Architecture for Performance, Energy Consumption and Lifetime Improvement." Proceedings of High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA). 2010.
- [ASP-DAC 10] Dimin Niu, Yibo Chen, Xiangyu Dong, Yuan Xie, "Energy and Performance Driven Circuit Design for Emerging Phase-Change Memory." Proceedings of Asia and South-Pacifc Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC). 2010.
- [SC 09] Xiangyu Dong, Naveen Muralimanohar, Norm Jouppi, Richard Kaufmann, Yuan Xie, "Leveraging 3D PCRAM Tech nologies to Reduce Checkpoint Overhead for Future Exascale Systems." Proceedings of International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC). 2009.
- [ICCAD 09] Xiangyu Dong, Norm Jouppi, Yuan Xie "PCRAMsim: System-Level Performance, Energy, and Area Modeling for Phase-Change RAM" Proceedings of International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD). 2009. pp 269-275.
- [ISCA 09] Xiaoxia Wu, Jian Li, Lixi Zhang, Evan Speight,
Ram Rajamony, Yuan Xie, "Hybrid Cache
Architecture.", In Proceedings of International Symposium on Computer
Architecture (ISCA), June, 2009.
- [HPCA 09] Guangyu Sun, Xiangyu Dong, Yuan Xie, Jian Li,
Yiran Chen, "A Novel 3D Stacked MRAM Cache
Architecture for CMPs", International Symposium on High Performance
Computer Architecture, 2009 (35 out of 185 submissions, 19%).
- [DAC 08] Xiangyu Dong, Xiaoxia Wu, Guangyu Sun, Helen
Li, Yiran Chen, Yuan Xie. "Circuit and
Mircoarchitecture Evaluation of 3D Stacking Magnetic RAM (MRAM) as a
Universal Memory Replacement" [PDF] , Proceedings of Design Automation
Conference (DAC) 2008.
Tutorial:
- Norm Jouppi and Yuan Xie, Emerging Technologies and Their Impact on
System Design, at 15th International Conference on
Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
(ASPLOS 2010).
- Norm Jouppi and Yuan Xie, Emerging
Technologies and Their Impact on System Design ,
International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage
and Analysis (SC). 2009.
*MAAEMO in Finnish means "The Mother Earth". The physical properties of the Earth allows life to evolve and persist. We envision the unique properties of emerging STT-RAM/PCRAM/RRAM (non-volatile memory sometimes is also called persistent memory) can also evolve novel circuits, architectures and applications.