Architectural Aspects in Design and Analysis of SOT-based Memories

Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM) is a very promising emerging memory technology because of its various advantages such as non-volatility, high density and scalability. In particular, Spin Orbit Torque (SOT) MRAM is gaining interest as it comes along with all the benefits of its predecessor Spin Transfer Torque (STT) MRAM, but is supposed to eliminate some of its shortcomings. Especially the split of read and write paths in SOT-MRAM promises faster access times and lower energy consumption compared to STT-MRAM. In this work, we provide a very detailed analysis of SOT-MRAM at both circuit-and architecture-level. We present a detailed evaluation of performance and energy related parameters and compare the novel SOT-MRAM with several other memory technologies. Our architecture-level analysis shows that with a hybrid-combination of SRAM for the L1-cache and SOT-MRAM for the L2-cache the energy consumption can be reduced by 63% in average while the performance can be increased by 1%. In addition, the memory area is 43% lower compared to an SRAM-only configuration.