Building a Fast and Power Efficient Inductive Charge Pump System for 3D Stacked Phase Change Memories

Phase change memory emerges as one of the most promising alternatives to traditional DRAM in terabyte main memory constructions. 3D stacking technology further enhances the scalability and capacity of PCM. However, write bandwidth of emerging 3D stacked PCMs is seriously limited by capacitive change pump widely adopted in 2D PCM chips. In this paper, we propose an inductive charge pump system design for 3D stacked PCMs. We further present a novel ICP aware page management technique to reduce average charging latency and improve memory bandwidth in a 3D stacked PCM-based main memory. Compared to a capacitive charge pump system, our inductive charge pump and page management technique improve the CPU performance by 54% and reduce the system energy by 29%