High-Speed Electronic Memories and Memory Subsystems

Memories have played a vital role in embedded system architectures over the years. A need for high-speed memory to be embedded with state-of-the-art embedded system to improve its performance is essential. This chapter focuses on the development of high-speed memories. The traditional static random access memory (SRAM) is first analyzed with its different variant in terms of static noise margin (SNM); these cells occupy a larger area as compared to dynamic random access memory (DRAM) cell, and hence, a comprehensive analysis of DRAM cell is then carried out in terms of power consumption, read and write access time, and retention time. A faster new design of P-3T1D DRAM cell is proposed which has about 50% faster reading time as compared to the traditional three-transistor DRAM cell. A complete layout of the structure is drawn along with its implementation in a practical 16-bit memory subsystem

Temperature Variation Operation of Mixed-VT 3T GC-eDRAM for Low Power Applications in 2Kbit Memory Array

Embedded memories were once utilized to transfer information between the CPU and the main memory. The cache storage in most traditional computers was static-random-access-memory (SRAM). Other memory technologies, such as embedded dynamic random-access memory (eDRAM) and spin-transfer-torque random-access memory (STT-RAM), have also been used to store cache data. The SRAM, on the other hand, has a low density and severe leakage issues, and the STT-RAM has high latency and energy consumption when writing. The gain-cell eDRAM (GC-eDRAM), which has a higher density, lower leakage, logic compatibility, and is appropriate for two-port operations, is an attractive option. To speed up data retrieval from the main memory, future processors will require larger and faster-embedded memories. Area overhead, power overhead, and speed performance are all issues with the existing architecture. A unique mixed-V_T 3T GC-eDRAM architecture is suggested in this paper to improve data retention times (DRT) and performance for better energy efficiency in embedded memories. The GC-eDRAM is simulated using a standard complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) with a 130nm technology node transistor. The performance of a 2kbit mixed-V_T 3T GC-eDRAM array were evaluated through corner process simulations. Each memory block is designed and simulated using Mentor Graphics Software. The array, which is based on the suggested bit-cell, has been successfully operated at 400Mhz under a 1V supply and takes up almost 60-75% less space than 6T SRAM using the same technology. When compared to the existing 6T and 4T ULP SRAMs (others' work), the retention power of the proposed GC-eDRAM is around 80-90% lower

Multi-port Memory Design for Advanced Computer Architectures

In this thesis, we describe and evaluate novel memory designs for multi-port on-chip and off-chip use in advanced computer architectures. We focus on combining multi-porting and evaluating the performance over a range of design parameters. Multi-porting is essential for caches and shared-data systems, especially multi-core System-on-chips (SOC). It can significantly increase the memory access throughput. We evaluate FinFET voltage-mode multi-port SRAM cells using different metrics including leakage current, static noise margin and read/write performance. Simulation results show that single-ended multi-port FinFET SRAMs with isolated read ports offer improved read stability and flexibility over classical double-ended structures at the expense of write performance. By increasing the size of the access transistors, we show that the single-ended multi-port structures can achieve equivalent write performance to the classical double-ended multi-port structure for 9% area overhead. Moreover, compared with CMOS SRAM, FinFET SRAM has better stability and standby power. We also describe new methods for the design of FinFET current-mode multi-port SRAM cells. Current-mode SRAMs avoid the full-swing of the bitline, reducing dynamic power and access time. However, that comes at the cost of voltage drop, which compromises stability. The design proposed in this thesis utilizes the feature of Independent Gate (IG) mode FinFET, which can leverage threshold voltage by controlling the back gate voltage, to merge two transistors into one through high-Vt and low-Vt transistors. This design not only reduces the voltage drop, but it also reduces the area in multi-port current-mode SRAM design. For off-chip memory, we propose a novel two-port 1-read, 1-write (1R1W) phasechange memory (PCM) cell, which significantly reduces the probability of blocking at the bank levels. Different from the traditional PCM cell, the access transistors are at the top and connected to the bitline. We use Verilog-A to model the behavior of Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST: the storage component). We evaluate the performance of the two-port cell by transistor sizing and voltage pumping. Simulation results show that pMOS transistor is more practical than nMOS transistor as the access device when both area and power are considered. The estimated area overhead is 1.7�, compared to single-port PCM cell. In brief, the contribution we make in this thesis is that we propose and evaluate three different kinds of multi-port memories that are favorable for advanced computer architectures

Design and Develop Efficient Arbitration Technique to Handle the Multiple Refresh Requests in Multi-Processor SoC

Emerging memory technologies, such as Gain Cell-embedded Dynamic Random Access Memory (GC-eDRAM), play an essential part in the process of improving the overall performance of current multi-processor systems. GC-eDRAM, on the other hand, has its own set of distinct issues, particularly with regard to refresh operations. The number of cores and threads in contemporary processors continues to expand, which in turn leads to an increase in the number of concurrent refresh requests. This might cause contention, which in turn can lead to a possible performance decrease. In this article, we present an efficient arbitration method that was developed in order to precisely address the issues that are associated with numerous requests for a refresh in GC-eDRAM. This method takes use of the inherent parallelism of GC-eDRAM modules to make it possible to execute simultaneous refresh operations. As a result, contention is effectively reduced, and the overall performance of the system is improved. We provide a new arbitration method that prioritizes the pending refresh requests according to their level of urgency and optimizes the allocation of GC-eDRAM resources in order to guarantee that refresh operations are carried out in an effective manner. Our method modifies the arbitration priority in a dynamic manner according to the characteristics of the active workload. These characteristics include the request arrival rate, memory access patterns, and data location, among other considerations

LOW POWER AND IMPROVED SPEED 1T DRAM USING DYNAMIC LOGIC

The new trend of the DRAM design is to characterize by its reliability, delay, low power dissipation, and area. This paper dealt with the design of 1-bit DRAM and efficient implementation of a sense amplifier. The proposed 1-bit DRAM designed using dynamic logic design. The proposed circuit consists of buffers, 1 transistor, and capacitor. The circuit is schematized by DSCH2 and layout designs are generated by Microwind CAD tool. The designed and proposed circuits are considered bypass logic and Boolean reduction technique that reduced number of transistors per designed cell logic. The circuits are simulated in various feature sizes namely CMOS 70 nm, CMOS 90 nm, CMOS 120nm and corresponding voltages 0.7 V, 1 V, 1.2 V respectively. Our proposed dynamic logic DRAM circuit has compared with the designed circuit and other existing circuits. Our proposed and designed circuit gives better results in terms of power dissipation, speed, and Area. (R-2) The projected 1-bit DRAM has an outcome and achieved low power 0.229 µW, the area of 22×13µm, the propagation delay of 21 ps and a speed of 0.17 GHz

Design and modelling of different SRAM's based on CNTFET 32nm technology

Carbon nanotube field-effect transistor (CNTFET) refers to a field-effect transistor that utilizes a single carbon nanotube or an array of carbon nanotubes as the channel material instead of bulk silicon in the traditional MOSFET structure. Since it was first demonstrated in 1998, there have been tremendous developments in CNTFETs, which promise for an alternative material to replace silicon in future electronics. Carbon nanotubes are promising materials for the nano-scale electron devices such as nanotube FETs for ultra-high density integrated circuits and quantum-effect devices for novel intelligent circuits, which are expected to bring a breakthrough in the present silicon technology. A Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) is designed to plug two needs: i) The SRAM provides as cache memory, communicating between central processing unit and Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM). ii) The SRAM technology act as driving force for low power application since SRAM is portable compared to DRAM, and SRAM doesn't require any refresh current. On the basis of acquired knowledge, we present different SRAM's designed for the conventional CNTFET. HSPICE simulations of this circuit using Stanford CNTFET model shows a great improvement in power saving.Comment: 15 Page

Dynamic fine-grain body biasing of caches with latency and leakage 3T1D-based monitors

In this paper, we propose a dynamically tunable fine-grain body biasing mechanism to reduce active & standby leakage power in caches under process variations.Preprin

Enabling a reliable STT-MRAM main memory simulation

STT-MRAM is a promising new memory technology with very desirable set of properties such as non-volatility, byte-addressability and high endurance. It has the potential to become the universal memory that could be incorporated to all levels of memory hierarchy. Although STT-MRAM technology got significant attention of various major memory manufacturers, to this day, academic research of STT-MRAM main memory remains marginal. This is mainly due to the unavailability of publicly available detailed timing parameters which are required to perform a cycle accurate main memory simulation. Our study presents a detailed analysis of STT-MRAM main memory timing and propose an approach to perform a reliable system level simulation of the memory technology. We seamlessly incorporate STT-MRAM timing parameters into DRAMSim2 memory simulator and use it as a part of the simulation infrastructure of the high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Our results suggests that, STT-MRAM main memory would provide performance comparable to DRAM, while opening up various opportunities for HPC system improvements. Most importantly, our study enables researchers to conduct reliable system level research on STT-MRAM main memory, and to explore the opportunities that this technology has to offer.This work was supported by BSC, Spanish Government through Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through TIN2015-65316-P project and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272). This work has also received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under ExaNoDe project (grant agreement No 671578). The authors wish to thank Terry Hulett, Duncan Bennett and Ben Cooke from Everspin Technologies Inc., for their technical support.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Design, performance, and energy consumption of eDRAM/SRAM macrocells for L1 data caches

(c) 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other worksSRAM and DRAM have been the predominant technologies used to implement memory cells in computer systems, each one having its advantages and shortcomings. SRAM cells are faster and require no refresh since reads are not destructive. In contrast, DRAM cells provide higher density and minimal leakage energy since there are no paths within the cell from Vdd to ground. Recently, DRAM cells have been embedded in logic-based technology (eDRAM), thus overcoming the speed limit of typical DRAM cells. In this paper, we propose a hybrid n-bit macrocell that implements one SRAM cell and n-1 eDRAM cells. This cell is aimed at being used in an n-way set-associative first-level data cache. Architectural mechanisms (e.g., special writeback policies) have been devised to completely avoid refresh logic. Performance, energy, and area have been analyzed in detail. Experimental results show that using typical eDRAM capacitors, and compared to a conventional cache, a 4-way set-associative hybrid cache reduces both energy consumption and area up to 54 and 29 percent, respectively, while having negligible impact on performance (less than 2 percent).This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (MICINN), and jointly financed with Plan E funds under Grant TIN2009-14475-C04-01 and by Consolider-Ingenio 2010 under Grant CSD2006-00046.Valero Bresó, A.; Petit Martí, SV.; Sahuquillo Borrás, J.; López Rodríguez, PJ.; Duato Marín, JF. (2012). Design, performance, and energy consumption of eDRAM/SRAM macrocells for L1 data caches. IEEE Transactions on Computers. 61(9):1231-1242. https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2011.138S1231124261

Reliability in the face of variability in nanometer embedded memories

In this thesis, we have investigated the impact of parametric variations on the behaviour of one performance-critical processor structure - embedded memories. As variations manifest as a spread in power and performance, as a first step, we propose a novel modeling methodology that helps evaluate the impact of circuit-level optimizations on architecture-level design choices. Choices made at the design-stage ensure conflicting requirements from higher-levels are decoupled. We then complement such design-time optimizations with a runtime mechanism that takes advantage of adaptive body-biasing to lower power whilst improving performance in the presence of variability. Our proposal uses a novel fully-digital variation tracking hardware using embedded DRAM (eDRAM) cells to monitor run-time changes in cache latency and leakage. A special fine-grain body-bias generator uses the measurements to generate an optimal body-bias that is needed to meet the required yield targets. A novel variation-tolerant and soft-error hardened eDRAM cell is also proposed as an alternate candidate for replacing existing SRAM-based designs in latency critical memory structures. In the ultra low-power domain where reliable operation is limited by the minimum voltage of operation (Vddmin), we analyse the impact of failures on cache functional margin and functional yield. Towards this end, we have developed a fully automated tool (INFORMER) capable of estimating memory-wide metrics such as power, performance and yield accurately and rapidly. Using the developed tool, we then evaluate the #effectiveness of a new class of hybrid techniques in improving cache yield through failure prevention and correction. Having a holistic perspective of memory-wide metrics helps us arrive at design-choices optimized simultaneously for multiple metrics needed for maintaining lifetime requirements