A wear-leveling-aware dynamic stack for PCM memory in embedded systems

Abstract

Phase Change Memory (PCM) is a promising DRAM replacement in embedded systems due to its attractive characteristics such as extremely low leakage power, high storage density and good scalability. However, PCM's low endurance constrains its practical applications. In this paper, we propose a wear leveling aware dynamic stack to extend PCM's lifetime when it is adopted in embedded systems as main memory. Through a dynamic stack, the memory space is circularly allocated to stack frames, and thus an even usage of PCM memory is achieved. The experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly reduce the write variation on PCM cells and enhance the lifetime of PCM memory.