D-MRAM cache: Enhancing energy efficiency with 3T-1MTJ DRAM / MRAM hybrid memory

This paper describes a proposal of non-volatile cache architecture utilizing novel DRAM / MRAM cell-level hybrid structured memory (D-MRAM) that enables effective power reduction for high performance mobile SoCs without area overhead. Here, the key point to reduce active power is intermittent refresh process for the DRAM-mode. D-MRAM has advantage to reduce static power consumptions compared to the conventional SRAM, because there are no static leakage paths in the D-MRAM cell and it is not needed to supply voltage to its cells when used as the MRAM-mode. Besides, with advanced perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions (p-MTJ), which decreases the write energy and latency without shortening its retention time, D-MRAM is capable of power reduction by replacing the traditional SRAM caches. Considering the 65-nm CMOS technology, the access latencies of 1MB memory macro are 2.2 ns / 1.5 ns for read / write in DRAM mode, and 2.2 ns / 4.5 ns in MRAM mode, while those of SRAM are 1.17 ns. The SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks have revealed that the energy per instruction (EPI) of the total cache memory can be dramatically reduced by 71 % on average, and the instruction per cycle (IPC) performance of the D-MRAM cache architecture degraded only by approximately 4 % on average in spite of its latency overhead.