• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.5 no.10
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• pp.2686-2703
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• 1998

The widening pClformnnce gap between processor and memory causes an emergence of the promising architecture, processor-memory (PM) integration In this paper, various design issues for P-M integration are studied, First, an analytical model of the DRAM access time is constructed considering both the bank conflict ratio and the DRAM page hit ratio. Then the points of both the performance improvement and the perfonnance bottle neck are found by the proposed model as designing on-chip DRAM architectures. This paper proposes the new architecture, called the delayed precharge bank architecture, to improve the perfonnance of memory system as increasing the DRAM page hit ratio. This paper also adapts an efficient bank interleaving mechanism to the proposed architecture. This architecture is verified !II he better than the hierarchical multi-bank architecture as well as the conventional bank architecture by executiun driven simulation. Eight SPEC95 benchmarks are used for simulation as changing parameters for the cache architecture, the number of DRAM banks, and the delayed time quantum.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.48 no.7
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• pp.48-56
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• 2011

Recently, new storage device SSD(Solid State Disk) based on NAND flash memory is gradually replacing HDD(Hard Disk Drive) in mobile device and thus a variety of research efforts are going on to find the cost-effective ways of performance improvement. By increasing the NAND flash channels in order to enhance the bandwidth through parallel processing, DRAM buffer which acts as a buffer cache between host(PC) and NAND flash has become the bottleneck point. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes an efficient low-cost scheme to increase SSD performance by improving DRAM buffer bandwidth through scheduling techniques which utilize DRAM multi-banks. When both host and NAND flash multi-channels request access to DRAM buffer concurrently, the proposed technique checks their destination and then schedules appropriately considering properties of DRAMs. It can reduce overheads of bank active time and row latency significantly and thus optimizes DRAM buffer bandwidth utilization. The result reveals that the proposed technique improves the SSD performance by 47.4% in read and 47.7% in write operation respectively compared to conventional methods with negligible changes and increases in the hardware.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.84-92
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• 2010

This paper proposes the semaphore authority management (SAM) controller to optimize the dual-port SDRAM (DPSDRAM) in the mobile multimedia systems. Recently, the DPSDRAM with a shared bank enabling the exchange of data between two processors at high speed has been developed for mobile multimedia systems based on dual-processors. However, the latency of DPSDRAM caused by the semaphore for preventing the access contention at the shared bank slows down the data transfer rate and reduces the memory bandwidth. The methodology of SAM increases the data transfer rate by minimizing the semaphore latency. The SAM prevents the latency of reading the semaphore register of DPSDRAM, and reduces the latency of waiting for the authority of the shared bank to be changed. It also reduces the number of authority requests and the number of times authority changes. The experimental results using a 1 Gb DPSDRAM (OneDRAM) with the SAM controllers at 66 MHz show 1.6 times improvement of the data transfer rate between two processors compared with the traditional controller. In addition, the SAM shows bandwidth enhancement of up to 38% for port A and 31% for port B compared with the traditional controller.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics A
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• v.32A no.12
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• pp.108-114
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• 1995

Recently, along wtih the advance of high-performance system, synchronous DRAM's (SDRAM's) which provide consecutive data output synchronized with an external clock signal, have been reported. However, in the conventional SDRAM's which utilize a multi-stage serial pipelined scheme, the column path is divided into multi-stages depending on CAS latency N. Thus, as the operating speed and CAS latency increase, new stages must be added, thereby causing a large area penalty due to additinal latches and I/O lines. In the proposed register-based parallel pipelined scheme, (N-1) registers are located between the read data bus line pair and the data output buffer and the coming data are sequentially stored. Since the column data path is not divided and the read data is directly transmitted to the registers, the busrt read operation can easily be achieved at higher frequencies without a large area penalty and degradation of internal timing margin. Simulation results for 0.32um-Tech. 4-Bank 64M SDRAM show good operation at 200MHz and an area increment is less than 0.1% when CAS latency N is increased from 3 to 4.. This pipelined scheme is more advantageous as the operating frequency increases.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.350-354
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• 2009

To optimize the performance of software programs, it is important to know certain hardware parameters such as the CPU speed, the cache size, the number of TLB entries, and the parameters of the memory subsystem. There exist several ways to obtain the values of various hardware parameters. Firstly. the values can be taken from the hardware manual. Secondly, the parameters can be obtained by calling functions provided by the operating systems. Finally, hardware detection programs can find the desired values. Such programs are usually executed on PC or server systems and report the CPU speed, the cache size, the number of TLB entries, and so on. However, they do not sufficiently detect the parameters of one of the most important parts of the computer concerning performance, namely the memory bank layout in the memory subsystem. In this paper, we present an algorithm to detect the memory bank parameters. We run an implementation of our algorithm on various embedded systems and compare the detected values with the real hardware parameters. The results show that the presented algorithm detects the cache size, the number of TLB entries, and the memory bank layout with high accuracy.