PCRAMsim: System-level performance, energy, and area modeling for Phase-Change RAM

Phase-change random access memory (PCRAM) is an emerging memory technology with attractive features, such as fast read access, high density, and non-volatility. Because of these attractive properties, PCRAM is regarded as a promising candidate for future universal memories, and system-level designers could open up new design opportunities by leveraging this new memory technology. However, the majority of the PCRAM research has been at the device level, and system-level design space exploration using PCRAM is still in its infancy due to the lack of high-level modeling tools for PCRAM-based caches and memories. In this paper, we present a PCRAM model, called PCRAMsim, to bridge the gap between the device-level and system-level research on PCRAM technology. The model is validated against industrial PCRAM prototypes. This new PCRAMsim tool is expected to help boost PCRAM-related studies such as next-generation memory subsystems.