• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.29 no.12
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• pp.759-763
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• 2016

We demonstrate the utilization of ion gel gate dielectrics for operating non-volatile transistor memory devices based on polymer semiconductor thin films. The gating process in typical electrolyte-gated polymer transistors occurs upon the penetration and escape of ionic components into the active channel layer, which dopes and dedopes the polymer film, respectively. Therefore, by controlling doping and dedoping processes, electrical current signals through the polymer film can be memorized and erased over a period of time, which constitutes the transistor-type memory devices. It was found that increasing the thickness of polymer films can enhance the memory performance of device including (i) the current signal ratio between its memorized state and erased state and (ii) the retention time of the signal.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.1-6
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• 2022

Modern computer systems usually have special hardware for operations used in deep learning workload even edge computing environment. Non-volatile memories (NVMs) have been considered for alternative memory storage because they consume little static energy and occupy small area. However, there is a problem for NVMs to be directly adopted. An NVM cell has limited write endurance, so that the lifetime of NVM-based memory system is much shorter than that of conventional memory system. To overcome this problem for the deep learning system, this paper proposes a novel method to extend the lifetime based on the analysis of the deep learning workloads. If an incoming block has more than a predefined number of frequently used values, the cacheline is defined as write friendly block. During the victim selection, the cacheline has lower possibility to be chosen as victim. The experimental results show that the lifetime is increased by about 50% and energy consumption is decreased by 3% with a little performance hurt.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.46-50
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• 2008

The effect of physicochemical properties of solvents on the microstructure of polyvinyl carbazole (PVK) film for non-volatile polymer memory was investigated. For the solubilization of PVK molecules and the preparation of PVK films, four solvents with different physicochemical properties of the Hildebrand solubility parameter and vapor pressure were considered: chloroform, tetrahydrofuran (THF), 1,1,2,2-tetrachloroethane (TCE), and N,N-dimehtylformamide (DMF). The solubility of PVK molecules in the solvents was observed by ultravioletvisible spectroscopy. PVK molecules were observed to be more soluble in chloroform, with a low Hildebrand solubility parameter, than solvents with higher values. The aggregated size and micro-/nano-topographical properties of PVK films were characterized using optical and atomic force microscopes. The PVK film cast from chloroform exhibited enhanced surface roughness compared to that from TCE and DMF. It was also confirmed that the microstructure of PVK film has an effect on the performance of non-volatile polymer memory.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.23 no.7
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• pp.428-433
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• 2017

Recently, the demand for high performance non-volatile memory storage devices that can replace existing hard disks has been increasing in environments requiring high performance computing such as data-centers and social network services. The performance of such non-volatile memory can greatly depend on the interface between the host and the storage device. With the evolution of storage interfaces, the non-volatile memory express (NVMe) interface has emerged, which can replace serial attached SCSI and serial ATA (SAS/SATA) interfaces based on existing hard disks. The NVMe interface has a higher level of scalability and provides lower latency than traditional interfaces. In this paper, an evaluation and analysis are conducted of the performance of NVMe storage devices through various workloads. We also compare and evaluate the cost efficiency of NVMe SSD and SATA SSD.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.157-163
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• 2021

A single write operation in a file system can modify multiple data, but these changes in the file system are not atomically written to disk. Thus, for the consistency of the file system, conventional journaling guarantees crash consistency instead of sacrificing the system performance. It is known that using non-volatile memory as a journal space can alleviate performance degradation due to low latency and byte-level accessibility of non-volatile memory. However, none of the journaling techniques considering non-volatile memory provide scalability. In this paper, journal space on non-volatile memory is divided into multiple regions for scalable journaling, thus dispersing concentrated operations in one region. Second, the journal area-specific operator structure is used to accelerate data write operations to storage devices. We apply the proposed technique to JFS to evaluate it on multi-core servers equipped with high-performance storage devices. The evaluation results show that the proposed technique performs better than the existing technique of the NVM-based journaling file system.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.262-269
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• 2005

Semiconductor scientists and engineers ideally desire the faster but the cheaper non-volatile memory devices. In practice, no single device satisfies this desire because a faster device is expensive and a cheaper is slow. Therefore, in this paper, we use heterogeneous non-volatile memories and construct an efficient hierarchy for them. First, a small RAM device (e.g., MRAM, FRAM, and PRAM) is used as a write buffer of flash memory devices. Since the buffer is faster and does not have an erase operation, write can be done quickly in the buffer, making the write latency short. Also, if a write is requested to a data stored in the buffer, the write is directly processed in the buffer, reducing one write operation to flash storages. Second, we use many types of flash memories (e.g., SLC and MLC flash memories) in order to reduce the overall storage cost. Specifically, write requests are classified into two types, hot and cold, where hot data is vulnerable to be modified in the near future. Only hot data is stored in the faster SLC flash, while the cold is kept in slower MLC flash or NOR flash. The evaluation results show that the proposed hierarchy is effective at improving the access time of flash memory storages in a cost-effective manner thanks to the locality in memory accesses.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.125-131
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• 2018

STT-RAM is attracting as a next generation Non-volatile memory for replacing cache memory with low leakage energy, high integration and memory access performance similar to SRAM. However, there is problem of write operations as the other Non_volatile memory. Hybrid cache memory using SRAM and STT-RAM is attracting attention as a cache memory structure with lowe power consumption. Despite this, reducing the leakage energy consumption by the STT-RAM is still lacking access to the Dynamic energy. In this paper, we proposed as energy management method such as a way-selection approach for hybrid L2 cache fo SRAM and STT-RAM and memory selection method of write/read operation. According to the simulation results, the proposed hybrid cache memory reduced the average energy consumption by 40% on SPEC CPU 2006, compared with SRAM cache memory.

• 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.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.106-111
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• 2023

The importance of load-to-use latency has been highlighted as state-of-the-art computing cores adopt deep pipelines and high clock frequencies. The cascaded cache was recently proposed to reduce the access cycle of the L1 cache by utilizing differences in latencies among banks of the cache structure. However, this study assumes the cache is comprised of SRAM, making it unsuitable for direct application to non-volatile memory-based systems. This paper proposes a novel mechanism and structure for lowering dynamic energy consumption. It inserts monitoring logic to keep track of swap operations and write counts. If the ratio of swap operations to total write counts surpasses a set threshold, the cache controller skips the swap of cache blocks, which leads to reducing write operations. To validate this approach, experiments are conducted on the non-volatile memory-based cascaded cache. The results show a reduction in write operations by an average of 16.7% with a negligible increase in latencies.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.32-39
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• 2008

Tunnel oxide of non-volatile memory (NVM) devices would be very difficult to downscale if ten-year data retention were still needed. This requirement limits further improvement of device performance in terms of programming speed and operating voltages. Consequently, for low-power applications with Fowler-Nordheim programming such as NAND, program and erase voltages are essentially sustained at unacceptably high levels. A promising solution for tunnel oxide scaling is tunnel barrier engineering (TBE), which uses multiple dielectric stacks to enhance field-sensitivity. This allows for shorter writing/erasing times and/or lower operating voltages than single $SiO_2$ tunnel oxide without altering the ten-year data retention constraint. In this paper, two approaches for tunnel barrier engineering are compared: the crested barrier and variable oxide thickness. Key results of TBE and its applications for NVM are also addressed.