| Title | : | EFGR: An Enhanced Fine Granularity Refresh Feature for High-Performance DDR4 DRAM Devices |
| Speaker | : | R Golda Brunet (IITM) |
| Details | : | Fri, 5 Sep, 2014 2:30 PM @ BSB 361 |
| Abstract: | : | A Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) cell holds data as charge in a capacitor and this capacitor has the tendency to leak the charge gradually over time. To maintain data integrity, DRAM devices periodically refresh the storage cells. The need for refresh operations is further aggravated by technology scaling and process variation, along with dynamic cell behaviours such as, variable retention and data pattern dependency. Recently proposed JEDEC DDR4 standard provides Fine Granularity Refresh (FGR) feature to tackle refresh by providing a range of options for refresh intervals and refresh cycles times. Motivated by the observation that during an FGR mode, only few banks are involved in the refresh operation, we aim to overlap an ongoing refresh operation by accessing the idle (non-refreshing) banks within a rank to service the memory requests. We propose an Enhanced FGR (EFGR) feature that introduces three optimizations to the basic FGR feature and exposes the bank-level parallelism within the rank even during the refresh. As the first optimization we bring-in minor modifications to the peripheral circuitry of the DRAM device so as to decouple the non-refreshing banks from the ongoing refresh operation. Second and third optimizations determine the maximum number of non-refreshing banks that can be active during refresh and selectively precharge the banks before refresh, respectively. Our simulation results show that EFGR feature is able to recover almost 56.6% of performance loss incurred due to refresh operations. EFGR being simple to implement, and compatible with other refresh handling techniques makes it an attractive candidate for future DDR standards. |
