A heterogeneous memory organization with minimum energy consumption in 3D chip-multiprocessors

Main memories play an important role in overall energy consumption of embedded systems. Using conventional memory technologies in future designs in nanoscale era cause a drastic increase in leakage power consumption and temperature-related problems. Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies offer many desirable characteristics such as near-zero leakage power, high density and non-volatility. They can significantly mitigate the issue of memory leakage power in future embedded chip-multiprocessor (eCMP) systems. However, they suffer from challenges such as limited write endurance and high write energy consumption which restrict them for adoption in modern memory systems. In this article, we propose a stacked hybrid memory system for 3D chip-multiprocessors to take advantages of both traditional and non-volatile memory technologies. For reaching this target, we present a convex optimization-based model that minimizes the system energy consumption while satisfy endurance constraint in order to design a reliable memory system. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves energy-delay product (EDP) and performance by about 44.8% and 13.8% on average respectively compared with the traditional memory design where single technology is used. © 2016 IEEE.