DOVA: A Dynamic Overwriting Voltage Adjustment for STT-RAM L1 Cache

Jinbo Chen1, Keren Liu1, Xiaochen Guo2, Patrick Girard3, Yuanqing Cheng1
1Beihang University, 2Lehigh University, 3CNRS, LIRMM


Abstract

As device integration density increases exponentially predicted by Moore’s law, power consumption becomes a bottleneck for system scaling. On the other hand, leakage power of on-chip cache occupies a large fraction of the total power budget. STT-RAM is a promising candidate to replace SRAM as on-chip cache due to its ultra-low leakage power, high integration density and non-volatility. However, building L1 cache with STT-RAM still faces severe challenges especially because of its high write latency and energy overheads. Moreover, intensive accesses in L1 cache accelerate oxide breakdown and threaten the lifetime of STT-RAM significantly. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Overwritting Voltage Adjustment (DOVA) technique for STT-RAML1 cache. A high write voltage is used for performance critical cache lines while a low write voltage is used for other cache lines to approach an optimal trade-off between reliability and performance. Experimental results show that the proposed technique can improve cache performance up to 18%, and 9% on average with almost the same reliability level as in the case when only the low write voltage is used.