• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.193-204
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• 2017

Various 3D-stacked DRAMs have been proposed to overcome the memory wall problem. Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) is a true 3D-stacked DRAM with stacked DRAM layers on top of a logic layer. The logic die is mainly used to implement a memory controller for HMC, and it is connected through a high speed serial link called SerDes with a host that is either a processor or another HMC. In HMC, the serial link is crucial for both performance and power consumption. Therefore, it is important that the link is configured properly so that the required performance should be satisfied while the power consumption is minimized. In this paper, we propose a HMC system model included the high speed serial link to estimate performance accurately. Since the link modeling strictly follows the link flow control mechanism defined in the HMC spec, the actual HMC performance can be estimated accurately with respect to each link configuration. Various simulations are conducted in order to deduce the correlation between the HMC performance and the link configuration with regard to memory utilization. It is confirmed that there is a strong correlation between the achievable maximum performance of HMC and the link configuration in terms of both bandwidth and latency. Therefore, it is possible to find the best link configuration when the required HMC performance is known in advance, and finding the best configuration will lead to significant power saving while the performance requirement is satisfied.