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High Performance Computing Laboratory

Texas A&M University College of Engineering

A Hybrid Buffer Design with STT-MRAM for On-Chip Interconnects

H. Jang, B. S. An, N. Kulkarni, K. H. Yum and E. J. Kim

Proceedings of ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip (NOCS), Copenhagen, Denmark, May 2012

As the chip multiprocessor (CMP) design moves toward many-core architectures, communication delay in Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been a major bottleneck in CMP systems. Using high-density memories in input buffers helps to reduce the bottleneck through increasing throughput. SpinTorque Transfer Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) can be a suitable solution due to its nature of high density and nearzero leakage power. But its long latency and high power consumption in write operations still need to be addressed. We explore the design issues in using STT-MRAM for NoC input buffers. Motivated by short intra-router latency, we use the previously proposed write latency reduction technique sacrificing retention time. Then we propose a hybrid design of input buffers using both SRAM and STT-MRAM to hide the long write latency efficiently. Considering that simple data migration in the hybrid buffer consumes more dynamic power compared to SRAM, we provide a lazy migration scheme that reduces the dynamic power consumption of the hybrid buffer. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme enhances the throughput by 21% on average.

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