• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics C
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• v.34C no.11
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• pp.1-11
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• 1997

The transient current components of the dRAM are analyzed and the sensing current, data path operation current and DC leakage current are revealed to be the major curretn components. It is expected that the supply voltage of less than 1.5V with low VT MOS witll be used in multi-giga bit dRAM. A low voltage dual VT self-timed CMOS logic in which the subthreshold leakage current path is blocked by a large high-VT MOS is proposed. An active signal at each node of the nature speeds up the signal propagation and enables the synchronous DRAM to adopt a fast pipelining scheme. The sensing current can be reduced by adopting 8 bit prefetch scheme with 1.2V VDD. Although the total cycle time for the sequential 8 bit read is the same as that of the 3.3V conventional DRAM, the sensing current is loered to 0.7mA or less than 2.3% of the current of 3.3V conventional DRAM. 4 stage pipeline scheme is used to rduce the power consumption in the 4 giga bit DRAM data path of which length and RC delay amount to 3 cm and 23.3ns, respectively. A simple wave pipeline scheme is used in the data path where 4 sequential data pulses of 5 ns width are concurrently transferred. With the reduction of the supply voltage from 3.3V to 1.2V, the operation current is lowered from 22mA to 2.5mA while the operation speed is enhanced more than 4 times with 6 ns cycle time.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.251-265
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• 2001

As the device scaling proceeds, the operating voltage(VDD) of giga-bit DRAMs is expected to be reduced to 1.5V or down, fir improving the device reliability and reducing the power dissipation. Therefore the low-voltage circuit design techniques are required to implement giga-bit DRAMs. In this work, state-of-art low-voltage DRAM circuit techniques are reviewed, and four kinds of low-voltage circuit design techniques are newly proposed for giga-bit DRAMs. Measurement results of test chips and SPICE simulation results are presented for the newly proposed circuit design techniques, which include a hierarchical negative-voltage word-line driver with reduced subthreshold leakage current, a two-phase VBB(Back-Bias Voltage) generator, a two-phase VPP(Boosted Voltage) generator and a bandgap reference voltage generator.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.88-93
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• 2015

In modern computer systems, DRAM is commonly used as main memory due to its low read/write latency and high endurance. However, DRAM is volatile memory that requires periodic power supply (i.e., memory refresh) to sustain the data stored in it. On the other hand, PCM is a promising candidate for replacement of DRAM because it is non-volatile memory, which could sustain the stored data without memory refresh. PCM is also available for byte-addressable access and in-place update. However, PCM is unsuitable for using main memory of a computer system because it has two limitations: high read/write latency and low endurance. To take the advantage of both DRAM and PCM, a hybrid main memory, which consists of DRAM and PCM, has been suggested and actively studied. In this paper, we propose a novel page replacement algorithm for hybrid main memory. To cope with the weaknesses of PCM, our scheme focuses on reducing the number of PCM writes in the hybrid main memory. Experimental results shows that our proposed page replacement algorithm reduces the number of PCM writes by up to 80.5% compared with the other page replacement algorithms.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.612-614
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• 2008

A novel linear switched termination active cross-coupled low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) transceiver operating at 1.5 GHz clock frequency is presented. On the transmitter side, an active cross-coupled linear output driver and a switched termination scheme are applied to achieve high speed with low current. On the receiver side, a shared pre-amplifier scheme is employed to reduce power consumption. The proposed LVDS transceiver implemented in an 80 nm CMOS process is successfully demonstrated to provide a data rate of 6 Gbps/pin, an output data window of 147 ps peak-to-peak, and a data swing of 196 mV. The power consumption is measured to be 4.2 mW/pin at 1.2 V.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.69-77
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• 2021

The widely used low-cost design methodology for IoT devices is very popular. In such a networked device, memory is composed of flash memory, SRAM, DRAM, etc., and because it processes a large amount of data, memory design is an important factor for system performance. Therefore, each device selects optimized design factors such as function, performance and cost according to market demand. The design of a memory architecture available for low-cost IoT devices is very limited with the configuration of SRAM, flash memory, and DRAM. In order to process as much data as possible in the same space, an architecture that supports parallel processing units is usually provided. Such parallel architecture is a design method that provides high performance at low cost. However, it needs precise software techniques for instruction and data mapping on the parallel architecture. This paper proposes an instruction/data mapping method to support optimized parallel processing performance. The proposed method optimizes system performance by actively using hardware and software parallelism.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2010.06a
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• pp.346-346
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• 2010

A capacitorless one transistor dynamic random access memory (1T-DRAM) on silicon-germanium-on-insulator substrate was investigated. SGOI technology can make high effective mobility because of lattice mismatch between the Si channel and the SiGe buffer layer. To evaluate memory characteristics of 1T-DRAM, the floating body effect is generated by impact ionization (II) and gate induced drain leakage (GIDL) current. Compared with use of impact ionization current, the use of GIDL current leads to low power consumption and larger sense margin.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2006.06a
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• pp.485-486
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• 2006

This paper proposes a novel low-cost CMOS temperature sensor for controlling the self-refresh period of a mobile DRAM. In this temperature sensor, ring oscillators composed of cascaded inverter stages are used to obtain the temperature of the chip. This method is highly area-efficient, simple and easy for IC implementation as compared to traditional temperature sensors based on analog bandgap reference circuits. The proposed CMOS temperature sensor was fabricated with 80 nm 3-metal DRAM process. It occupies a silicon area of only about less than $0.02\;mm^2$ at $10^{\circ}C$ resolution with under 5uW power consumption at 1 sample/s processing rate. This area is about 33% of conventional temperature sensor in mobile DRAM.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1998.06a
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• pp.530-533
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• 1998

In this paper, a new scheme of a boosted voltage generator (BVG) is designed for low powr DRAM's. The designed BVG can supply stable $V_{pp}$ using a new circuit operting method. This method controls charge pumping capability by switching the supply voltage and ring oscillator frequency of driving circuit, so the BVG can save area and reduce the powr dissipation during $V_{pp}$ maintaining period. The charge pumping circuit of the BVG suffers no $V_{T}$ loss and is to be applicable to low-voltage DRAM's. $V_{pp}$ level detecting circuit can detect constant value of $V_{pp}$ against temperature variation. The level of $V_{pp}$ varies -0.55%~0.098% during its maintaining period. Charge pumping circuit can make $V_{pp}$ level up to 2.95V with $V_{cc}$ =1.5V. The degecting level of $V_{pp}$ level detecting circuit changes -0.34% ~ 0.01% as temperature varies from -20 to 80.deg. C. The powr dissipation during V.$_{pp}$ maintaining period is 4.1mW.W.1mW.

• The Journal of the Institute of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.65-70
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• 2021

Recently, as the number of mobile apps rapidly increases, the memory size of smartphones keeps increasing. Smartphone memory consists of DRAM and as it is a volatile medium, continuous refresh operations for all cells should be performed to maintain the contents. Thus, the power consumption of memory increases in proportion to the DRAM size of the system. There are attempts to configure the memory system with low-power non-volatile memory instead of DRAM to reduce the power consumption of smartphones. However, non-volatile memory has weaknesses in write operations, so analysis of write behaviors is a prerequisite to realize this in practical systems. In this paper, we extract memory reference traces of mobile apps and analyze their characteristics specially focusing on write operations. The results of this paper will be helpful in the design of memory management systems consisting of non-volatile memory in future smartphones.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.151-160
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• 2018

NAND flash memories have the advantages of fast access speed, high density and low power consumption, thus they have increasing demand in embedded system and mobile environment. Despite the low power and fast speed gains of NAND flash memory, DRAM disk buffers were used because of the performance load and limited durability of NAND flash cell. However, DRAM disk buffers are not suitable for limited energy environments due to their high static energy consumption. In this paper, we propose WAP-LRU (Write pattern Analysis based Placement by LRU) hybrid disk buffer management policy. Our policy designates the buffer location in the hybrid memory by analyzing write pattern of the workloads to check the continuity of the page operations. In our simulation, WAP-LRU increased the lifetime of NAND flash memory by reducing the number of garbage collections by 63.1% on average. In addition, energy consumption is reduced by an average of 53.4% compared to DRAM disk buffers.