Publications

Abstract not provided.

DRAM technology is the main building block of main memory, however, DRAM scaling is becoming very challenging. The main issues for DRAM scaling are the increasing error rates with each new generation, the geometric and physical constraints of scaling the capacitor part of the DRAM cells, and the high power consumption caused by the continuous need for refreshing cell values. At the same time, emerging Non- Volatile Memory (NVM) technologies, such as Phase-Change Memory (PCM), are emerging as promising replacements for DRAM. NVMs, when compared to current technologies e.g., NAND-based ash, have latencies comparable to DRAM. Additionally, NVMs are non-volatile, which eliminates the need for refresh power and enables persistent memory applications. Finally, NVMs have promising densities and the potential for multi-level cell (MLC) storage.

The Memory Management Unit (MMU) is one of the most important parts of any modern computing system. It can be thought of as the hardware support for virtual memory, which enforces access permissions, and manages the translation of processes' virtual addresses into real memory physical addresses. The operating system (OS) allocates the physical memory in a small granularity frames that can be accessed by processes with appropriate permissions. Each process has the illusion of having an entire memory space, however, the actual addresses issued by the process, (`virtual addresses'), are translated into the physical frame address allocated by the OS through virtual memory.