CoolDRAM: An Energy-Efficient and Robust DRAM

DRAM is the most mature and widely-utilized memory structure as main memory in computing systems. However, energy dissipation and latency of DRAM are two of the most serious limiting factors of this technology. All DRAM main operations are initiated by a Precharge phase, which is time-consuming and power-hungry. This work proposes a novel DRAM cell access scheme that entirely eliminates Precharge phase from DRAM read, write, and refresh operations, with a very slight modification in commodity DRAM structure. The proposed DRAM design, called CoolDRAM, operates using a single extra cell row as reference cells. CoolDRAM reduces energy dissipation by about 34% on average, with a negligible area overhead of about 0.4%. The robustness of CoolDRAM against process variation and environmental noises is 61x and 1.78x of the state-of-the-art, respectively, while maintaining the same power consumption and latency.