DRAMPower v3.1 Released!

The latest version of the tool now includes IO and Termination power measures from Micron’s DRAM Power Calculator for all supported DRAM generations. This feature enables support for power estimation of dual-rank DRAMs (DDR2/3/4). Additionally, new warning messages have been added, to identify if the memory or bank state is inconsistent in the user-defined command traces. This release also fixes minor bugs related to Precharge All (PREA) to improve the accuracy of DRAM power estimation.

Check it out here.

Two Papers Accepted at DATE 2014

Today we celebrate that the Memory Team had both papers submitted to DATE accepted as full papers at the conference. The first paper was written by Manil Dev Gomony and is entitled “Coupling TDM NoC and DRAM Controller for Cost and Performance Optimization of Real-Time Systems”. This paper discusses area, power and performance benefits of coupling the arbitration in a TDM NoC with the memory controller arbitration, thereby reducing the number of arbitration points on the path from processor to memory. The second paper entitled “Exploiting Expendable Process-Margins in DRAMs for Run-Time Performance Optimization” was first-authored by Karthik Chandrasekar. This paper shows how to exploit excessive process margins in DRAMs by proposing a methodology for how to determine the minimum timings that a memory can safely run at, thereby improving performance.

DRAMPower v3.0 Released!

DRAMPower v3.0 has been released! The tool can now be employed with two interfaces: (1) Command traces and (2) Transaction traces (new feature). To facilitate usage of memory transaction traces, DRAMPower now includes an optional DRAM command scheduler, which dynamically schedules and logs DRAM commands, corresponding to the incoming memory transactions, as if it was connected to a memory controller. The scheduler assumes a closed-page policy, employs FCFS scheduling across transactions and uses ASAP scheduling for DRAM commands. This release also adds support for DDR4 and LPDDR3 devices and fixes minor bugs to improve the accuracy of DRAM power estimation. Click here to check it out.

DRAMPower v2.0 Released!

The new version of our tool for fast and accurate system-level power estimation of DRAMs has been released. This version features many important improvements, such as significantly improved analysis speed (at least 10x), enabling analysis of much larger traces, as well as support for LPDDR/LPDDR2 and Wide I/O memories. The results of this version have furthermore been verified by Kaiserslautern University of Technology using equivalent circuit-level SPICE simulations, which established that the error of the tool is < 2% for all memory operations of any granularity for all memories supported by DRAMPower.

For more information, or to download the tool, please refer to the official DRAMPower website.

Paper Accepted at DAC 2013

For the second year in a row, Karthik Chandrasekar lands a paper at the prestigious Design Automation Conference (DAC). The paper is entitled “Towards Variation-Aware System-Level Power Estimation of DRAMs: An Empirical Approach” and discusses how to obtain more realistic power estimates with high-level power models by making them aware of process variation. Just like his recently accepted DATE paper, this work is a result of a successful collaboration with Christian Weis and Norbert Wehn at the University of Kaiserslautern.

Update: The paper is now available online. Click here to read it.

Paper Accepted at DAC 2012

Today, we congratulate Karthik Chandrasekar on getting his paper “Run-Time Power-Down Strategies for Real-Time SDRAM Memory Controllers” accepted at Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2012, where it will be presented in early June. The paper proposes two run-time power down strategies for real-time SDRAM controllers that reduce power without sacrificing guaranteed bandwidth. One strategy is conservative and saves power without affecting latency, whereas the second is more aggressive and saves additional power at a slightly increased latency. The paper also presents an algorithm to select the most energy-efficient power-down mode at run-time.

Update: The camera-ready version is now available. Click here to download it.