Abstract

With the invention of hierarchy of memories, one of the eight great ideas in computer science, more focuses of chip design have turned from how to get more performance out of Moore’s law to address von Neumann bottleneck. SRAM has served us well for on-chip cache design, but their problems of low density and high static energy have brought more and more research attention.

In my talk, I will introduce some of the advances in memory technology and we will look at three emerging memory technologies in particular: EDRAM , STT-RAM and PCM . We will think about what architectural and design techniques we can take to utilise them efficiently and effectively. We will also briefly talk about the industrial application of these technologies towards the end of the talk.