Emerging Memory Technologies Design Architecture and Applications

Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, such as PCRAM and STT-RAM, are getting mature in recent years. These emerging NVM technologies have demonstrated great potentials to be the candidates for future computer memory architecture design. It is important for SoC designers and computer architects to understand the benefits and limitations of such emerging memory technologies, to improve the performance/power/reliability of future memory architectures. This chapter gives a brief introduction of these memory technologies, reviews recent advances in memory architecture design, discusses the benefits of using at various levels of memory hierarchy, and also reviews the mitigation techniques to overcome the limitations of applying such emerging memory technologies for future memory architecture design.