Highly reliable and low-power nonvolatile cache memory with advanced perpendicular STT-MRAM for high-performance CPU

Abstract

This paper presents a novel nonvolatile last level cache (LLC) based on the advanced perpendicular STT-MRAM to reduce the total power consumption of LLC. The presented LLC has novel readout circuit with the dual-sensing salvation scheme that enhances reliability of STT-MRAM along with typical error-correcting code (ECC). The comparison of CPU performance per power with SRAM-based, embedded DRAM and conventional STT-MRAM-based LLCs indicates that the presented novel nonvolatile LLC is the most suitable for large LLC.