Warranty-aware page management for PCM-based embedded systems

Abstract

The thriving growth in mobile consumer electronics makes energy efficiency in the embedded system design an important and recurring theme. Phase Change Memory (PCM) has shown its potential in replacing DRAM as the main memory option due to its (65%) reduced energy requirements. However, when considering the usage of PCM main memory, its write endurance becomes a critical issue, and wear leveling design is a common approach to resolve this issue. Even though the wear leveling design should stress operation efficiency and overhead reduction, existing wear leveling strategies designed for PCM main memory are usually dedicated to prolonging the lifetime of PCM. In this paper, we propose the perspective that, instead of valuing PCM lifetime exploitation as the first priority, we should turn to satisfy the product warranty period. To this end, further enhancement of operation efficiency and reduction of management overhead could be achieved. We thus propose a warrantyaware page management design to enhance the operation efficiency for managing the endurance issue in PCM. To show the effectiveness of the proposed design, we collected real traces on fiasco.OC by running SPEC2006 benchmarks with different write intensity workloads. The experiment results showed that our design reduced the overhead to one third of that of the state-of-the-art designs while still providing the same level of performance.