PCM Main Memory for Low Power Embedded System

Nonvolatile memories in memory hierarchy have been investigated to reduce its energy consumption because nonvolatile memories consume zero leakage power in memory cells. One of the difficulties is, however, that the endurance of most nonvolatile memory technologies is much shorter than the conventional SRAM and DRAM technology. This has limited its usage to only the low levels of a memory hierarchy, e.g., disks, that is far from the CPU. In this paper, we study the use of a new type of nonvolatile memories - the Phase Change Memory (PCM) with a DRAM buffer system as the main memory. Our design reduced the total energy of a DRAM main memory of the same capacity by 80%. These results indicate that it is feasible to use PCM technology in place of DRAM in the main memory for better energy efficiency.