Proposal of A Novel Hybrid NAND-Like MRAM/DRAM Memory Architecture

Due to the high refresh energy consumption, DRAM cannot meet the low energy consumption demand of IoT terminal, and the volatile data further limits its application in in-memory computing system. A non-volatile architecture utilizing novel hybrid NAND-like MRAM/DRAM cells that enables effective power and area reduction for high performance memory system is presented. The non-volatile characteristic of MRAM makes up for the refresh operation of DRAM and the leakage current path is eliminated in our proposed structure. The proposed two working modes, which are MRAM mode and DRAM mode, are explored with a novel writing scheme and expected to satisfy the demands of different memory hierarchy. To take the advantage of the hybrid structure, computing in memory operation is studied, solving the problem of data destruction caused by DRAM in the memory computing operation. At last, power consumption, writing speed and area overhead are analyzed in detail.