Low-Power-Management Engine: Driving DDR Towards Ultra-Efficient Operations
Zhuorui Liu, Yan Li, Xiaoyang Zeng · Micromachines · 2025
To address the performance and power concerns in Double-Data-Rate SDRAM (DDR) subsystems, this paper presents an innovative method for the DDR memory controller scheduler. This design aims to strike a balance between power consumption and performance for the DDR subsystem. Our approach entails a critical reassessment of established mechanisms and the introduction of a quasi-static arbitration protocol for the DDR's low-power mode (LPM) transition processes. Central to our proposed DDR power-management framework is the Low-Power-Management Engine (LPME), complemented by a suite of statistical algorithms tailored for implementation within the architecture. Our research strategy encompasses real-time monitoring of the DDR subsystem's operational states, traffic intervals, and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. By dynamically fine-tuning the DDR subsystem's power-management protocols to transition in and out of identical power modes, our method promises substantial enhancements in both energy efficiency and operational performance across a spectrum of practical scenarios. To substantiate the efficacy of our proposed design, an array of experiments was conducted. These rigorous tests evaluated the DDR subsystem's performance and energy consumption under a diverse set of workloads and system configurations. The findings are compelling: the LPME-driven architecture delivers significant power savings of over 41%, concurrently optimizing performance metrics like latency increase by no more than 22% in a high-performance operational context.