Exploring potentials of perpendicular magnetic anisotropy STT-MRAM for cache design

Traditional CMOS integrated circuits suffer from elevated power consumption as technology node advances. A few emerging technologies are proposed to deal with this issue. Among them, STT-MRAM is one of the most important candidates for future on-chip cache design. However, most STT-MRAM based architecture level evaluations focus on in-plane magnetic anisotropy effect. In the paper, we evaluate the most advanced perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) STT-MRAM for on-chip cache design in terms of performance, area and power consumption perspectively. The experimental results show that PMA STT-MRAM has higher power efficiency compared to SRAM as well as desirable scalability with technology node shrinking.