Omitting Refresh
Matthias Jung, Éder F. Zulian, Deepak M. Mathew, Matthias Herrmann, Christian Brugger, Christian Weis, Norbert Wehn · 2015
Dynamic Random Access Memories (DRAM) have a big impact on performance and contribute significantly to the total power consumption in systems ranging from mobile devices to servers. Up to half of the power consumption of future high density DRAM devices will be caused by refresh commands. Moreover, not only the refresh rate does depend on the device capacity, but it strongly depends on the temperature as well. In case of 3D integration of MPSoCs with Wide I/O DRAMs the power density and thermal dissipation are increased dramatically. Hence, in 3D-DRAM even more DRAM refresh operations are required. To master these challenges, clever DRAM refresh strategies are mandatory either on hardware or on software level using new or already available infrastructures and implementations, such as Partial Array Self Refresh (PASR) or Temperature Compensated Self Refresh (TCSR).