Massed Refresh: An Energy-Efficient Technique to Reduce Refresh Overhead in Hybrid Memory Cube Architectures

Ishan G. Thakkar, Sudeep Pasricha

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents a novel, energy-efficient DRAM refresh technique called massed refresh that simultaneously leverages bank-level and sub array-level concurrency to reduce the overhead of distributed refresh operations in the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC). In massed refresh, a bundle of DRAM rows in a refresh operation is composed of two subgroups mapped to two different banks, with the rows of each subgroup mapped to different sub arrays within the corresponding bank. Both subgroups of DRAM rows are refreshed concurrently during a refresh command, which greatly reduces the refresh cycle time and improves bandwidth and energy efficiency of the HMC. Our experimental analysis shows that the proposed massed refresh technique achieves up to 6.3% and 5.8% improvements in throughput and energy-delay product on average over JEDEC standardized distributed per-bank refresh and state-of-the-art scattered refresh techniques.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 29th International Conference on VLSI Design, VLSID 2016 - Held concurrently with 15th International Conference on Embedded Systems
Pages104-109
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781467387002
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 16 2016
Event29th International Conference on VLSI Design, VLSID 2016 - Kolkata, India
Duration: Jan 4 2016Jan 8 2016

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on VLSI Design
Volume2016-March
ISSN (Print)1063-9667

Conference

Conference29th International Conference on VLSI Design, VLSID 2016
Country/TerritoryIndia
CityKolkata
Period1/4/161/8/16

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Bank-level parallelism
  • DRAM
  • Distributed refresh
  • Energy-ef-ficiency
  • Hybrid Memory Cube

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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