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Circuit and microarchitecture evaluation of 3D stacking magnetic RAM (MRAM) as a universal memory replacement

Published: 08 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM) has been considered as a promising memory technology due to many attractive properties. Integrating MRAM with CMOS logic may incur extra manufacture cost, due to its hybrid magnetic-CMOS fabrication process. Stacking MRAM on top of CMOS logics using 3D integration is a way to minimize this cost overhead. In this paper, we discuss the circuit design issues for MRAM, and present the MRAM cache model. Based on the model, we compare MRAM against SRAM and DRAM in terms of area, performance, and energy. Finally we conduct architectural evaluation for 3D microprocessor stacking with MRAM. The experimental results show that MRAM stacking offers competitive IPC performance with a large reduction in power consumption compared to SRAM and DRAM counterparts.

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  1. Circuit and microarchitecture evaluation of 3D stacking magnetic RAM (MRAM) as a universal memory replacement

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      DAC '08: Proceedings of the 45th annual Design Automation Conference
      June 2008
      993 pages
      ISBN:9781605581156
      DOI:10.1145/1391469
      • General Chair:
      • Limor Fix
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 08 June 2008

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      1. 3D stacking
      2. MRAM

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