• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.24 no.11
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• pp.1-9
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• 2019

In this paper, we propose a Small Active Command scheme which reduces the power consumption of the command bus to DRAM. To do this, we target the ACTIVE command, which consists of multiple packets, containing the row address that occupies the largest size among the addresses delivered to the DRAM. The proposed scheme identifies frequently referenced row addresses as Hot pages first, and delivers index numbers of small caches (tables) located in the memory controller and DRAM. I-ACTIVE and I-PRECHARGE commands using unused bits of existing DRAM commands are added for index number transfer and cache synchronization management. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the command bus power consumption by 20% and 8.1% on average in the close-page and open-page policies, respectively.