A Locality-Aware Write Filter Cache for Energy Reduction of STTRAM-Based L1 Data Cache

作者：Kong Joonho^*

来源：Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science, 2016, 16(1): 80-90.

DOI：10.5573/JSTS.2016.16.1.080

• Spin torque transfer random access memory
• filter cache
• energy efficiency
• performance
• L1 data cache

Thanks to superior leakage energy efficiency compared to SRAM cells, STTRAM cells are considered as a promising alternative for a memory element in on-chip caches. However, the main disadvantage of STTRAM cells is high write energy and latency. In this paper, we propose a low-cost write filter (WF) cache which resides between the load/store queue and STTRAM-based L1 data cache. To maximize efficiency of the WF cache, the line allocation and access policies are optimized for reducing energy consumption of STTRAM-based L1 data cache. By efficiently filtering the write operations in the STTRAM-based L1 data cache, our proposed WF cache reduces energy consumption of the STTRAM-based L1 data cache by up to 43.0% compared to the case without the WF cache. In addition, thanks to the fast hit latency of the WF cache, it slightly improves performance by 0.2%.

• 出版日期2016-2