Recent Advances in DRAM and Flash Memory Architectures

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent research on DRAM and NAND flash memory, focusing on understanding their properties, modeling, and proposing new mechanisms to address scaling challenges through simulation and experimental analysis.

Contribution

It provides extended summaries of recent advances in modeling and mechanisms for DRAM and flash memory, based on detailed device and application-level studies.

Findings

Characterization of memory device properties

Development of new memory scaling mechanisms

Insights into bottlenecks of memory technologies

Abstract

This article features extended summaries and retrospectives of some of the recent research done by our group, SAFARI, on (1) understanding, characterizing, and modeling various critical properties of modern DRAM and NAND flash memory, the dominant memory and storage technologies, respectively; and (2) several new mechanisms we have proposed based on our observations from these analyses, characterization, and modeling, to tackle various key challenges in memory and storage scaling. In order to understand the sources of various bottlenecks of the dominant memory and storage technologies, these works perform rigorous studies of device-level and application-level behavior, using a combination of detailed simulation and experimental characterization of real memory and storage devices.