The notifications from the DATE conference are in and the Memory Team scores 2 out of 2, just like in 2014. The first paper entitled “A Generic, Scalable and Globally Arbitrated Memory Tree for Shared DRAM Access in Real-Time Systems” was first-authored by Manil and is a collaboration with Jamie Garside and Neil Audsley from University of York. The paper proposes a memory interconnect for shared memory architectures in many-core systems. A main architectural feature is that the interconnect is heavily pipelined enabling it to be synthesized at high frequencies even with a large number of clients. Another highlight is that it has global arbitration that can be programmed to behave like several different arbitration mechanisms, such as TDM, CCSP and FBSP.
The second paper “Retention Time Measurements and Modelling of Bit Error Rates of WIDE I/O DRAM in MPSoCs”was first-authored by our colleagues at Kaiserslautern University of Technology in collaboration with Sven Goossens from our Memory Team. This paper looks into the thermal behavior of 3D-stacked WIDE I/O DRAM and compares its impact on retention time and bit error rates to conventional 2D DRAM chips.