Energy Efficiency of Opportunistic Refreshing for Gain-Cell Embedded DRAM

Binyamin Frankel, Eyal Sarfati, Davide Rossi, Shmuel Wimer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

On-die memories, which are traditionally implemented by SRAM, stop functioning properly when the supply voltage is scaled down aggressively; hence, embedded DRAMs (eDRAMs) are used instead. Opportunistic refreshing was proved to eliminate the performance loss incurred by the eDRAM refreshing must. We show here that Gain-Cell eDRAM (GCeDRAM) supplemented with opportunistic refreshing consumes significantly smaller power and energy than SRAM. Analysis supported by hardware simulations demonstrate that the same design point achieves maximum performance and minimum energy. Replacement of the data memory in the ultra-low power processor PULPino from SRAM to opportunistically refreshed GCeDRAM yielded 30% energy savings in the memory, which translated into 7% savings in the entire processor.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1605-1612
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers
Volume70
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2004-2012 IEEE.

Funding

The Household Energy Use Survey in Xiamen in this research is sponsored by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), Japan, through its Asian Development Bank (ADB) funded project RETA 7450.

FundersFunder number
Institute for Global Environmental Strategies
Asian Development Bank

    Keywords

    • Low-power processors
    • embedded memories
    • gain-cell
    • memory refreshing

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