Reducing Method of Energy Consumption of Phase Change Memory using Narrow-Value Data

During the past 30 years, DRAM has been used for the reasons of economic efficiency of the production. Recently, PRAM has been emerged to overcome the shortcomings of DRAM. In this paper, we propose a technique that can reduce energy consumption by use of a narrow values to the write operation of PRAM. For this purpose, we describe the data compression method using a narrow value and the architecture of PRAM, We also experiment under the Simple-scalar 3.0e simulator and SPEC CPU2000 benchmark environments. According to the experiments, the data hit rate of PRAM was increased by 39.4% to 67.7% and energy consumption was reduced by 9.2%. In order to use the proposed technique, it requires 3.12% of space overhead per word, and some additional hardware modules.