In recent years, emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, e.g., Phase-Change RAM (PCRAM), STT-RAM (MRAM) Resistive RAM (RRAM), and Memristors, have gained substantial attentions and are being actively pursued by industry. With combined attractive features such as scalability, fast read/write, negligibel leakage, and non-volatility, these emerging memory technologies demonstrated a great potential to be the candidates of the future universal memories.

As such emerging memory technologies are getting mature, it is important for circuit/architecture designers to understand their pros and cons for better utilizing them to improve the performance/power/reliability of future computing systems. This project seeks to answer the questions as follows: How to model such emerging memory technologies at circuit/architecture levels? What will be the impacts of such memory technologies on the future computer system designs? What are the research challenges to overcome for the widely-adoption of these technologies? What will be the novel applications/architectures that can leverage such emerging memory technologies?

This tutorial paper gives an overview of the motivation of this project. Yuan Xie. "Modeling, Architecture, and Applications for Emerging Non-volatile Memory Technologies." IEEE Computer Design and Test, Vol.28, No.1, pp.44-51, January 2011

Acknowledgement:

The MAAEMO project is supported in part by NSF 1218867, 1213052, and Department of Energy under Award Number DE-SC0005026.

Tool Release:

• PCRAMsim: It is a tool for estimating the optimum access times, and power dissipation of a PCRAM-based memory. (Beta version with technical details are published in ICCAD 2009)
• NVsim : NVsim is a suite of toolsets for modeling cache/memory/storage that are based on the emerging non-volatile memory technologies.
• NVmain : NVmain is a memory simulator for both DRAM-based main memory and emerging NVM-based main memory, as well as 3D stacked and wide-IO DRAM main memory.