Demystifying Emerging Nonvolatile Memory Technologies: Understanding Advantages, Challenges, Trends, and Novel Applications

Hetro8T: power and area efficient approximate heterogeneous 8T SRAM for H.264 video decoder

“…However, for the H.264 video decoder, the SRAM buffer size requirement is only ∼154 kB [31]. For this small size SRAM, dynamic power have much higher proportion than the leakage power [6, 13] and STT‐RAM and PCM have much higher dynamic power requirement compared to SRAM [27]. All these reasons make proposed SRAM architecture better candidate for H.264 video decoder than STT‐RAM and PCM.…”

“…Recently, many emerging memories like spin transfer torque (STT) RAM [16, 27], phase change memory (PCM) [27, 28], logic‐compatible gain cell [17–19] are proposed for cache in place of SRAM. Unlike SRAM, which consumes a significant amount of power in leakage, STT‐RAM and PCM have low leakage and could be one of the options for energy intensive application such as video compression and decompression, data mining, and so on.…”

“…In literature, STTRAM and PCM have also been shown for the approximate storage [26, 29]. However, STTRAM and PCRAM require large write time and write energy as compared to the SRAM [26, 27]. In order to reduce write energy, work done in [26] authors have designed the heterogeneous sized STT‐RAM architecture for multimedia applications where for LOBs, relatively low width transistors compared to HOBs.…”

“…The proposed approximate SRAM utilises the voltage scaling method and shows the large energy benefits. However, voltage scaling method is not suitable for the STT‐RAM and PCM [27], as large current is required for writing the data in the STT‐RAM. In H.264 video decoder, SRAMs are used as buffer and have almost equal proportion of number of writes and reads.…”

“…In H.264 video decoder, SRAMs are used as buffer and have almost equal proportion of number of writes and reads. As STT‐RAM and PCM have significantly large write energy requirement [27], they become unsuitable for the video applications. The low leakage property of the STT‐RAM attracts the researcher to see STT‐RAM as potential candidate for SRAM replacement.…”