• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.48 no.7
• /
• pp.48-56
• /
• 2011

Recently, new storage device SSD(Solid State Disk) based on NAND flash memory is gradually replacing HDD(Hard Disk Drive) in mobile device and thus a variety of research efforts are going on to find the cost-effective ways of performance improvement. By increasing the NAND flash channels in order to enhance the bandwidth through parallel processing, DRAM buffer which acts as a buffer cache between host(PC) and NAND flash has become the bottleneck point. To resolve this problem, this paper proposes an efficient low-cost scheme to increase SSD performance by improving DRAM buffer bandwidth through scheduling techniques which utilize DRAM multi-banks. When both host and NAND flash multi-channels request access to DRAM buffer concurrently, the proposed technique checks their destination and then schedules appropriately considering properties of DRAMs. It can reduce overheads of bank active time and row latency significantly and thus optimizes DRAM buffer bandwidth utilization. The result reveals that the proposed technique improves the SSD performance by 47.4% in read and 47.7% in write operation respectively compared to conventional methods with negligible changes and increases in the hardware.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.51 no.5
• /
• pp.114-124
• /
• 2014

HEVC is a state-of-the-art video coding standard developed by JCT-VC. HEVC provides about 2 times higher subjective coding efficiency than H.264/AVC. One of the main goal of HEVC development is to efficiently coding UHD resolution video so that HEVC is expected to be widely used for coding UHD resolution video. Decoding such high resolution video generates a large number of memory accesses, so a decoding system needs high-bandwidth for memory system and/or internal communication architecture. In order to determine such requirements, this paper presents an analysis of the memory access complexity for HEVC decoder. we first estimate the amount of memory access performed by software HEVC decoder on an embedded system and a desktop computer. Then, we present the memory bandwidth models for HEVC decoder by analyzing the data flow of HEVC decoding tools. Experimental results show the software decoder produce 6.9-40.5 GB/s of DRAM accesses. also, the analysis reveals the hardware decoder requires 2.4 GB/s of DRAM bandwidth.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
• /
• v.13 no.4
• /
• pp.509-514
• /
• 2009

In this paper, we designed and analyzed 256GB DRAM-based SSD storage using DDR1 memory and PCI-e interface. SSD is a storage system that uses DRAM or NAND Flash as primary storage media. Since the SSD read and write data directly to memory chips, which results in storage speeds far greater than conventional magnetic storage devices, HDD. Architecture of the proposed SSD system has performance of high speed data processing duo to use multiple RAM disks as primary storage and PCI-e interface bus as communication path of RAM disks. We constructed experimental system with UNIX, Windows/Linux server, SAN Switch, and Ethernet Switch and measured IOPS and bandwidth of proposed SSD using IOmeter. In experimental results, it has been shown that IOPS, 470,000 and bandwidth,800MB/sec of the DDR-1 SSD is better than those of the HDD and Flash-based SSD.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.48 no.7
• /
• pp.57-64
• /
• 2011

To adjust the difference of bandwidth between host interface and NAND flash memory, DRAM is adopted as the buffer management in SSD (Solid-state Disk). In this paper, we propose cost-effective techniques to enhance SSD performance instead of using expensive high bandwidth DRAM. The SSD data can be classified into three groups such as user data, meta data for handling user data, and FEC(Forward Error Correction) parity/ CRC(Cyclic Redundancy Check) for error control. In order to improve the performance by considering the features of each data, we devise a flexible burst control method through monitoring system and a page based FEC parity/CRC application. Experimental results show that proposed methods enhance the SSD performance up to 25.9% with a negligible 0.07% increase in chip size.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
• /
• v.3 no.2
• /
• pp.407-415
• /
• 1996

This paper introduces two schemes to improve the frame buffer access bandwidth. The first scheme suggests a rasterizer called SBUFRE that has Span Z Buffer and Span Z＆ Color Buffer within a rasterizer. The second scheme suggests a ZDRAM that has Z-value comparator within the DRAM. These schemes are to convert read- modify-write Z buffer compare into single write only operation that improves approximately 50% frame buffer access bandwidth.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.38 no.8
• /
• pp.54-61
• /
• 2001

A fully on-chip open-drain CMOS output driver was designed for high bandwidth DRAMs, such that its output voltage swing was insensitive to the variations of temperature and supply voltage. An auto refresh signal was used to update the contents of the current control register, which determined the transistors to be turned-on among the six binary-weighted transistors of an output driver. Because the auto refresh signal is available in DRAM chips, the output driver of this work does not require any external signals to update the current control register. During the time interval while the update is in progress, a negative feedback loop is formed to maintain the low level output voltage ($V_OL$) to be equal to the reference voltage ($V_{OL.ref}$) which is generated by a low-voltage bandgap reference circuit. Test results showed the successful operation at the data rate up to 1Gb/s. The worst-case variations of $V_{OL.ref}$ and $V_OL$ of the proposed output driver were measured to be 2.5% and 7.5% respectively within a temperature range of $20^{\circ}C$ to $90^{\circ}C$ and a supply voltage range of 2.25V to 2.75V, while the worst-case variation of $V_OL$ of the conventional output driver was measured to be 24% at the same temperature and supply voltage ranges.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Next Generation Computing
• /
• v.13 no.4
• /
• pp.40-51
• /
• 2017

Recently, as mobile workloads are becoming more data-intensive, high data bandwidth is required for mobile memory which also consumes non-negligible system energy. A variety of researches and technologies are under development to improve and optimize mobile memory technologies. However, a comprehensive study on the latest mobile memory technologies (LPDDR or Wide I/O) has not been extensively performed yet. To construct high-performance and energy-efficient mobile memory systems, quantitative and detailed analysis of these technologies is crucial. In this paper, we simulate the computer system which adopts mobile DRAM technologies (Wide I/O and LPDDR3). Based on our detailed and comprehensive results, we analyze important factors that affect performance and energy-efficiency of mobile DRAM technologies and show which part can be improved to construct better systems.

• Journal of KIISE
• /
• v.44 no.2
• /
• pp.124-131
• /
• 2017

The emerging next-generation manycore processors for high-performance computing are equipped with a high-bandwidth on-package memory along with the traditional host memory. The Multi-Channel DRAM (MCDRAM), for example, is the on-package memory of the Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing (KNL) processor, and theoretically provides a four-times-higher bandwidth than the conventional DDR4 memory. In this paper, we suggest a mechanism to exploit MCDRAM for improving the performance of MPI intra-node communication. The experiment results show that the MPI intra-node communication performance can be improved by up to 272 % compared with the case where the DDR4 is utilized. Moreover, we analyze not only the performance impact of different MCDRAM-utilization mechanisms, but also that of core affinity for processes.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• v.32 no.1
• /
• pp.84-92
• /
• 2010

This paper proposes the semaphore authority management (SAM) controller to optimize the dual-port SDRAM (DPSDRAM) in the mobile multimedia systems. Recently, the DPSDRAM with a shared bank enabling the exchange of data between two processors at high speed has been developed for mobile multimedia systems based on dual-processors. However, the latency of DPSDRAM caused by the semaphore for preventing the access contention at the shared bank slows down the data transfer rate and reduces the memory bandwidth. The methodology of SAM increases the data transfer rate by minimizing the semaphore latency. The SAM prevents the latency of reading the semaphore register of DPSDRAM, and reduces the latency of waiting for the authority of the shared bank to be changed. It also reduces the number of authority requests and the number of times authority changes. The experimental results using a 1 Gb DPSDRAM (OneDRAM) with the SAM controllers at 66 MHz show 1.6 times improvement of the data transfer rate between two processors compared with the traditional controller. In addition, the SAM shows bandwidth enhancement of up to 38% for port A and 31% for port B compared with the traditional controller.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.80-88
• /
• 1999

In this paper, we propose a Special Memory for Graphics(SMGRA) which accelerates memory access time for graphics operations. The SMGRA has a rectangular array memory architecture which has already proposed by Whelan to process pixels in the rectangle area simultaneously, but the SMGRA should improve address decoding time and reduce the number of address pins by using address multiplexing scheme. The SMGRA has a Z-value comparator in the DRAM which is to convert read-modify-write Z buffer into single-write only operation that improves approximately 50% frame buffer access bandwidth.